


This Is The One

by disappointed_turtle



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-06-07 18:03:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19474471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disappointed_turtle/pseuds/disappointed_turtle
Summary: Jaime, Brienne, football, feminism, friendship, dogs, cake, sex. Good things, basically. No one is getting crushed by bricks after a wildly unbelievable 'relapse' in this story. No one is ending up celibate and having to spend their life playing the diplomat between lots of men who have failed upwards.Modern universe, this world.It'll probably be quite crude.Title from The Stone Roses song.I'll update very soon as it's almost finished.





	1. Chapter 1

Brienne has entertained the fantasy of Jaime walking in on her _pleasuring herself_ a few times over the past eight months. As with her other Jaime-related fantasies, Jaime is allowed to remain himself – tall, golden, and with a nose, jawline and cheekbones so angular that they demand professional attention: mathematicians should get out their protractors and start measuring; artists should get out their easels and paint him; photographers should snap him; scientists should start reconsidering their stance on eugenics and breed from him. She, Brienne, meanwhile is given the mother of all fricking makeovers. Not for her the mere removal of a pair of glasses, a scrunchie and some paint-spattered overalls. Her limbs are shortened and thinned, her chin pointed, her nose straightened, her breasts engorged, her pubic hair and the odd stray on her nipples -painlessly- stripped away, her head hair thickened and lengthened, her freckles erased, her feet pixified, her cheeks dimpled. On and on, the improvements go, until Jaime is permitted to wander across her brain and into her room and discover a woman on the bed who looks nothing like Brienne, flushed of face, naked or in a sheer negligee, legs akimbo, and with her _massager_ on full power. Naturally, he is overcome with lust for this goddess and his mouth quickly replaces the toy, and his whispers of “God, you’re beautiful” are a huge improvement on the industrial-grade buzzing.

The reality of Jaime bearing witness to her self-pleasure is somewhat different, as Brienne discovers today, when he walks into her room a whole half hour earlier than he was meant to.

For one thing, Brienne isn’t actually a character on The Sims or made of plasticine. Those giant limbs, tiny breasts and wonky nose are here to stay, though thankfully she had tweezed out the stray nipple hairs the day before (Ygritte commenting as she emerged from the bathroom, “You’ve been tweezing again, haven’t you? You always sneeze.”).

For another, she isn’t actually naked or dressed sexily on the bed when Jaime comes in. No. Fate does not even grant her that small dignity. Tracksuit bottoms and knickers around her ankles, Winnie the Poo hoodie pulled up to reveal her breasts, Brienne is straddling the flamingo pink beanbag that Sansa sewed for her, this being the one comfy place in reach of the free plug socket.

Her face is not delicately flushed. Her lips are not pouting. There is no dewy sheen to her skin. She is simply red, a bit sweaty and horrified.

And for the final thing -the cherry of mortification on the cake of shame, if you will - Ygritte, Margaery, Arya and Sansa are all somewhere about the shared house, so Brienne had put on music to drown out the growl of her vibrator. When Jaime bursts in after only ONE GODDAM KNOCK (ONE GODDAM KNOCK! What the HELL was the point of knocking at all?!), Blurred Lines is playing, and Robin Thicke’s voice purrs creepily, “I know you want it… I know you want it.”

Jaime, apparently not wanting it one bit, manages a strangled “Oh. Christ. Sorry.” before falling out of the room almost as quickly as he entered it and slamming the door shut. Brienne, stopping both music and vibrator, hears him taking the stairs three at a time as though he can never put enough space between himself and what he has just seen.

Ygritte’s voice sounds in the hall. “You better not be breakin’ our stairs, Jay Lan.”

“No,” says Jaime.

“You seen a ghost or somethin’?”

“No. She’s just… not ready yet.”

“Come in ‘ere then and wait,” offers Ygritte. “We’re doing a Roald Dahl watchathon. We’re on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You prefer Depp or Wilder?”

_I want_ , thinks Brienne as she pulls her pants up and her hoodie down _, to be punished chocolate factory-style. I want to be sucked up a pipe and carried far away from here. I want to be thrown down a rubbish chute by squirrels. I want to be sent by TV and made so tiny that I can hide like a borrower in the walls and never be found. I want to be carried far away in a glass elevator._

She falls face down upon her bed. How will she ever speak to him again? How will she ever be able to look him in the eye after what he has just seen? How will she ever be able to wank again without this scenario rising, nightmarish and grisly, before her eyes, chasing away any chance of orgasm? She will not be able to hear buzzing or a door knock or pop music without this moment recreating itself, sending her into a trembling heap of horror, crouched upon the floor. She cannot think of a single person in the world who she would less have wanted to see her like that, whose mockery she could less easily endure. And yet even as she thinks it, she knows it is worse than that. He won’t mock her. There are certain people in this world -oddballs like Kim Jong Un, Ann Widecombe, Michael Gove, Mitch McConnell -who can never be pictured as sexual beings. One cannot imagine them even possessing genitals. To imagine Kim Jong Un’s groin is to imagine a smooth, hairless area of plastic, like a doll’s groin. To imagine them attempting to masturbate is even stranger. These people surely have nothing to offer others and no sexual urges of their own. _And that_ , Brienne think, _is how the world, including Jaime, thinks of me. He’ll be mystified at someone like me playing at sex. He’ll pity me. He’ll try to be kind and I can’t bear it._

Her phone vibrates. There is a text from Jaime from earlier that she missed – “Finished sooner than expected so I’ll get to yours a bit earlier” – ( _Yeah, no shit you got here early_ ) and another text from just now – “I’m sorry.”

Then another. “Are you all right?”

_No_ , thinks Brienne _. No. I am not all right. How would I be all right?_

J: “Do you still want to go?”

_He’s trying to wriggle out of taking me now. Feckadoodle. What if he thinks I did it on purpose? That I was trying to seduce him? Surely he wouldn’t think that. I wasn’t exactly dressed to impress._

B: “Blurred Lines was only on because my music was on shuffle.”

J: “Ok.”

B: “I don’t even like it.”

B: “I never normally listen to it.”

J: “No, it’s quite rapey.”

J: “Are you still coming?”

J: “Shit. Coming with me, I mean.”

J: “Shit. Coming to test-drive the car with me.”

J: “I should stop using the word come. Are you approaching/moving towards/attending/drawing closer to the test-driving of the car with me?”

_Is he doing this on purpose?_

B: “Probably better if you go on your own.”

J: “Seriously?”

Brienne freezes, unsure of how to respond.

J: “Look, I should have knocked and waited. I’m sorry. Obviously I never thought I’d be walking in on that.”

Brienne flinches. _That_. _That_ being her. Red-faced and fanny out.

With one word, she, in her sexually aroused and mostly-naked state, is reduced to something inhuman. Something contemptible that Jaime had _obviously_ never expected to see, because Brienne, being large and ugly, _obviously_ , could never dream of being a sexual being even in the privacy of her own room.

B: “Obviously. And obviously I never wanted you to see _that_. Ever. But you barged in, and I’m really quite grossed out and I’m sure you are too.”

J: “I’m not.”

J: “I just really wish I’d waited for you to say come in.”

_Yes. It must have been awful for you. I should offer to pay for the therapy sessions for the PTSD that’ll plague you for the next decade._

B: “I’ll maybe see you around. Bit busy for the next few weeks though.”

He doesn’t reply for a minute. Then-

J: “Got it. See you around.”


	2. Chapter 2

Jaime had met Brienne eight months earlier, when he had been walking home one night on a lonely bit of towpath beside the canal. It was a dark, grim night, which had become even grimmer when he had been jumped from behind by three boys in balaclavas. _ASBOs_ -that’s what Tyrion would have mentally called them, probably before offering them contracts to work for his ‘security’ if they didn’t hurt him. Tyrion could never stand pain. Cersei would have called them troglodytes and loudly mocked their thick accents to her omnipresent bodyguard as she passed them by, unassailed. Jaime wasn’t sure what he would call them, but that wasn’t the pressing issue really, because they were on him, and if that shining knife wasn’t going to damage him, the fumes from the over-enthusiastically-applied aftershave would.

“Give us your watch!” one of the lads had said, and Jaime had looked rather doubtfully at his left wrist where the plastic Winnie the Pooh bought by his nine-year-old niece resided. It wasn’t the boys’ fault, of course -men who dressed like Jaime generally had a Rolex or Panerai rather than an overweight yellow bear as a timepiece- but to labour the point, Jaime had pressed the button on the side of the face, and Winnie had lit up and announced, “Time for some honey.”

“It’s no babe magnet,” he had informed them, though actually, it was. Only the other week a baby on a train had seen it and begun wailing and lunging for it. The mother had given Jaime an angry look, as though he had purposely worn it to enflame the covetous nature of the baby population.

“Your wallet then,” said another boy, much too excitedly. His first heist presumably. Today Jaime Lannister’s wallet on a towpath in the seedy part of Manchester with Gaz and Callum. Tomorrow 4.5 million from the Las Vegas casinos with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Perhaps he needed the money to sort out his halitosis. Jaime couldn’t imagine even the kindest girl in the world being prepared to kiss that mouth.

Jaime was, strangely, more repulsed by his situation than he was afraid. He hadn’t been around teenage boys since he had been a teenage boy. They were horrible creatures -sticky-haired from all the gel they used, always wanking into socks or apple pies, never showering properly, doing stupid Jackass stunts, leaving bowls of half-eaten cereal all over their smelly bedrooms, blaring their shitty music in public places, drinking Special Brew and vomiting it across pavements. He had felt a surge of rage that these _pricks_ thought they could put their grubby, gel-and-spunk-laced hands on him and demand his possessions.

What hurt most at that age? Being humiliated in front of mates.

“Your mouth smells like a rat crawled in there, took a shit, and then died,” he told the boy coldly. “You can take my money if you promise to spend it on some kind of intensive dental hygiene plan. I’d see it as a service to mankind.”

“Shut your fuckin’ mouth,” Bad Breath yelled, even as his mates smirked audibly.

“Your PIN number,” said one of the other boys.

Did they actually think he would give them the real 4 digits?

“It’s just PIN,” Jaime had said. “Personal identification number. You don’t need to repeat ‘number’.”

Then he had thought of his credit cards, debit card, driving license and work ID card, and he had thought _nope_.

“You can have the cash. Not the wallet.”

“Eh, mate,” the guy with the knife had said mildly, calmer than his two pals who were acting like puppies on their first ever walk. “Don’t think you’re in a position to say what we can and can’t have.”

Jaime had begged to differ. He had shoulder-charged, and in a gloriously slapstick moment which rivalled even the time that Cersei had projectile vomited all across her seventh birthday cake, Knife Boy had staggered backwards into the canal. The other two were on Jaime instantly. This was a bad time to discover that the mugging budget had stretched to two knives, but Jaime still managed to headbutt one boy as he waited for his throat to be opened up and hot blood to spurt out in a particularly macabre fountain. Suddenly though, amidst the dark and drizzle and chaos, another man was there. A man as big as Jaime. He punched the guy with the second knife to the ground. He did something to Bad Breath that had him doubled up and all-but screaming of his intention to stay in from now on with his mum, a cup of hot cocoa and a game of scrabble. He hunched, sobbing about his “fuckin’ balls.”

“Take off your belt!” Jaime’s rescuer had yelled, in a decidedly unmanly voice. “And your tie or scarf or....”

Jaime, slightly stunned that there was yet another person on this towpath apparently determined to divest him of his personal effects, and that she was a woman, nevertheless removed belt and scarf, his eyes not straying from the two groaning hulks on the ground. In the canal, Knife Boy 1 was no longer splashing madly.

“He can’t swim,” moaned one of the hulks.

“Maybe he shouldn’t have chosen a canal towpath to mug someone then,” Jaime had muttered.

“Tie them up!” the woman ordered, and she thrust her phone at Jaime before diving straight into the water and vanishing. Jaime gasped in horror, but, after what could only have been ten seconds though it felt much longer, two figures had surfaced from the inky water.

“Have you tied them up?” barked the woman, propelling her gibbering charge to the bank. She wasn’t even out of breath.

“N-no,” Jaime had said, as he kneeled to pull the deadweight of the gasping boy back onto land. By the time he had turned to help the woman too, she had already hoisted herself out, reclaimed her phone and was marching towards the nearest boy. She must be as strong as an ox.

“Did you pick up the knife?”

“No,” Jaime admitted.

“Have you at least rung the police?” she demanded, locating the knife, kicking it out of reach, and bending to bind the boy’s hands with Jaime’s scarf, using the backlight of her phone.

“No,” snapped Jaime, beginning to resent the ruthless competence of this woman. It was as though this kind of thing happened to her regularly. As though she were always going about fighting off robbers, disarming them, performing citizen’s arrests, and saving people from drowning, and Jaime wasn’t at all living up to her expectations of a sidekick. “I was waiting for you to surface,” he said grumpily.

“Ring them then,” she had said, grabbing Jaime’s belt and moving swiftly onto another whinging dark shape. “Have you a phone? Do you need to use mine?”

“Of course I’ve got a phone.”

By the time the police had arrived, Jaime had extracted from the woman her name -Brienne, the fact that she had been running but that this was not her usual route, and that she had done no more than kick Bad Breath in the testicles, despite the boy’s protestations that he had been stabbed there. Brienne, for her part, had received Jaime’s name, his brother’s name, his niece’s favourite skipping rope chants and which teachers she disliked, the play he had just watched and his irritation at the audience member who had done a smug little laugh every time there was a highbrow joke, his opinions on social mobility, the fact that he was off work with stress, and the one piece of information she had actually sought -why he had not simply given up his wallet: “I thought I’d rather die than have the bureaucracy of cancelling bank cards and getting a new license and ID card,” he had told her in a voice that certainly sounded sane enough. Talking to Brienne in the dark was a bit like how he imagined Catholic confession to be. You just talked and couldn’t see the expression of your listener, and you felt like a better person afterwards.

“Does your job have a lot of paperwork?” she had asked, teeth chattering.

“Oh yes.”

“Perhaps it’s time for a career change.”

He had at last persuaded her to accept his overcoat. Brienne had at first been determined that Canal/Knife Boy 1 should be the one to benefit from it. Jaime had watched, aghast, as she bent over the horrible, unhygienic teenage boy, who had hardly been improved by his sojourn in the canal, and tenderly began to tuck around him a garment that cost more than most people earned in a month. Jaime had put his foot down and Brienne had finally allowed him to pull the coat around her wet, shivering body.

Once the police cars arrived with their bright headlights, Jaime was able to learn more. She was young. Much younger than he would have believed possible when she was channelling Wonder Woman and James Bond about ten minutes ago. When he had been failing miserably to be her Steve Trevor or even Miss Moneypenny. She was probably not much more than twenty. She was very blonde, and had one of those shaved-on-one-side haircuts which Tyrion would say meant she was a lesbian, and which Jaime, quite fascinated by now, was ferociously determined did not mean anything of the sort. She had a tattoo along her left inner forearm but he could not tell what. She wore black running shorts, a white T shirt and trainers, and Jaime accepted his overcoat back as a police officer gave her a thermal blanket. Jaime had about four seconds, during the changeover, to admire the powerful, sexy-as-hell muscles in Brienne’s calves, thighs and biceps, and the round curve of her arse. The joys of the cliched wet T shirt and visibly hard nipples were also not lost on him. Her flesh was covered in goosepimples, and the tiny hairs stood up along her arms. Jaime wondered if he was becoming a pervy old man. He was thirty-five, for fuck’s sake, not fifteen. He only went to concerts if there was seating. His nine-year-old niece had to show him how to work his phone.

They had ridden in a police car together to make their statements and the officer in the passenger seat -PC Dibbs- had turned to eye Jaime and said, “Jaime Lannister?”

“Yes,” Jaime had said defensively.

“Hmm, thought I recognised you,” said the man, before transferring his attention to Brienne. “And your name, love?”

He had been shuffling some papers which perhaps gave Brienne the idea that he was asking in an official capacity rather than making small talk. She gave him her full name.

“Brienne Tarth,” the policeman had said. “Brienne Tarth... Ah! Not…Not… Man United Ladies! You’re not her, are you?”

Beside Jaime, Brienne had cringed. “Man United _Women_ ,” she had amended. “Yeah.”

Well, thought Jaime, that explained the body. Jaime worked out because he liked pretending he was the guy in the Paco Rabanne advert when he got dressed every morning, clicking his fingers at his toothbrush and his dogs. Brienne worked out so she could compete at the top level. It was, Jaime felt, the difference between Narcissus, wasting away as he gazed at himself in a forest pool, and Athena, splitting open Zeus’s head and going off to war.

“You’re my nine-year-old’s favourite player,” PC Dibbs was saying. “She wants to play football too, when she’s older.”

“She should start now,” Brienne had told him. “Don’t let her school push the boys into football and the girls into netball. They should play everything and not be sex-segregated at that age.”

But PC Dibbs wasn’t listening. “Her mother -my ex - takes her to all the games. I’d like to take her to watch the men, but it’s too expensive. Cheaper to buy a season ticket for the women than a single ticket for the men. Good value, the women’s game is.”

“Not for the women,” Brienne had muttered, and Jaime had seen a flash of real annoyance on her irregular features.

“Aye, you get paid a lot less,” the officer had said, with the air of having a “gotcha!” up his sleeve, something Jaime could see Brienne had worked out too. “But you don’t bring in as much, do you? The fellers bring in millions in revenue. The ladies’ game -well, you must bring in peanuts. I’ll not comment on why!” he had added with a chuckle. “I value my balls too much and I saw what you did to that lad!”

“Perhaps,” Brienne had replied, her tone icy, “it might be down to the FA banning women’s football for fifty years because they deemed it ‘quite unsuitable for females,’ and because they felt threatened by the fact that it was drawing bigger crowds than the men’s game. Do you think that could have anything to do with it? Or do you think there might perhaps be a vicious circle where TV and media outlets don’t provide any coverage for us because they believe there’s no interest, when actually it’s because there is no coverage that there is no interest? Or perhaps it’s down to football clubs refusing to adequately fund women’s football because they’re largely run by rich old men who don’t actually see women as equal?”

If this scene were a comic strip, Brienne would be wearing a cape and thigh-high boots, and PC Dibbs would have numerous thought bubbles blooming above his head. “Feminists! Humourless bitches.” “Dyke. She needs a good seeing to.” Jaime would have hearts blooming in his eyes.

The policeman shifted his eyes to Jaime’s to exchange a smirk of male solidarity with him, but Jaime’s disdain must have been evident. That or Dibbs recalled that this was Tywin Lannister’s eldest brat, and had no wish to trade virile grins with him. PC Dibbs sat forward again and spoke not another word until they reached the station.

Jaime and Brienne had made their statements in separate rooms, and afterwards, Jaime had waited for her outside the reception. She had emerged, still in her wet clothes. Jaime knew they would have offered her dry ones -GMP had recently been investigated over a farcical and highly-publicised incident involving an arrested circus clown, an arseful of heroin, wet clothes, and death from hypothermia. If Brienne had come out still in her wet clothes it was either because she’d decided to sexually frustrate Jaime just a bit more with the sight of her nipples both pointing at him as though conferring on his suitability for sucking on them, or it was because she was self-sufficient beyond sense. Jaime guessed that it was the latter, and it didn’t bode particularly well for him now as he tried to keep himself in her life a bit longer.

“Someone picking you up?” he had asked casually. “A boyfriend? If not, I’ve a taxi coming. You can share.”

“Thank you, I’ll run home though. I hadn’t been out long.” Polite but firm, she turned away.

“Your number then,” Jaime had said. “Can I have it? Just so I know you’re home safely.”

He was rewarded for this daring by the look of embarrassed confusion that crept across the girl’s face. She’d been so terrifyingly in control all night, marching round like the Terminator T-1000, doing just what needed to be done. But not now. Her eyes were crazy-beautiful and he tried to hold her gaze but she quickly looked away and started kicking at the ground with one foot. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen someone blush like that. He pulled out his phone and typed ‘Brienne’ into his contacts, then waited for her to give him her number, as if he had no doubt but that she would oblige. She told him at last, in a slightly sing-song way, as though that were the only way she could recall it.

Jaime gave her a missed call, said, “Text me then” and watched as she jogged away, her long legs flexing and giving him the kind of outraging-public-decency-themed fantasy that probably shouldn’t be had just outside a police station.

Once home, he had climbed into bed to watch highly-stylised Youtube compilation videos of her, all set to pulsating music that made you want to dance or fuck. He had assumed, because of her size, she would be a goalie, but no. Brienne’s body was purpose-built for getting that spherical lump of air and synthetic leather into the net, not keeping it out. Jaime watched as she dodged defenders, nutmegged goalkeepers, ran onto cross after cross, and curled the ball past the wall and right into the top corner from thirty-five yards. He watched her goals -screamers from outside the box, headers into the top corner, tap ins, overhead kicks, the chips over helpless goalkeepers. He watched her celebrations with teammates, them pouring over her like ants. She was spectacular. Deft, graceful, always in the right place at the right time.

He watched her trip in the penalty area, argue when the ref awarded her a penalty that she hadn’t actually been fowled, and, when the ref refused to accept this, Jaime watched as she very deliberately blasted the ball five metres wide of goal.

He watched as, in teeming rain, she took an elbow to the face and dropped to her knees, blood gushing from her broken nose and down her mud-sodden shirt.

He watched as she rolled her eyes at a streaker running about on the pitch.

He watched as she lifted her shirt, revealing rock-hard abs, to wipe sweat from her brow.

He watched as she comforted a player on the opposing team at the end of a match that had seen them relegated.

He watched as she pulled away her teammate -Stark, number 11 -from going postal on another player.

Exhausted, he had fallen asleep after that -he had spent a lot of time sleeping since being signed off a few weeks earlier- and when he awoke the next morning, she had indeed texted him to say that she was home safely. Jaime wasn’t sure what the etiquette was here. He suspected that he might have fucked up by not replying to this text instantly, by not even staying awake for it. He had after all demanded it, and it would have shown for her as unread until 10am.

Hurriedly he texted back that he was glad, that he wasn’t sure if he had thanked her last night for saving him, but that he was grateful. It was a bland message and frankly it deserved the response it got four hours later: a thumbs up emoji. Still, Jaime had felt the disappointment curl up inside him, a huge, heavy weight. He rang Tyrion.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of the Man Utd women players do actually house share in real life. It's a very young team. 'This is The One' is the song played just before the matches start.

When the doorbell goes, Brienne only goes to answer because she thinks it is the Stable Boy Stripper, and she feels someone ought to warn him not to do his gyrating too close to Arya. She is pondering the wording of her caution, is even considering whether she should have typed out a page of ‘Arya: Dos and Don’ts’, based on lessons learnt from the last stripper encounter (Don’t make eye contact for more than three seconds, Don’t make any sudden movements, Don’t play Vengaboys songs, Don’t flap your willy at her, Do not, even in jest, mock her slanket, Don’t put your cowboy hat on her head, and so on). When she opens the door, however, it is to find not the Stable Boy, but Jaime, with two bottles of Tequila under his arm.

She has not seen him since The Cataclysmic Clitoris Catastrophe of sixteen days, four hours, and around seventeen minutes ago, and she has fended off the texts he has sent with excuses of being far too busy -which would have been much more convincing if Jaime did not already have first-hand knowledge that when Brienne isn’t training or playing matches, she is bumming about the house reading, making cakes, watching films with her team/housemates -or wanking.

She knows, logically, that what happened is probably not up there with the worst of masturbatory mishaps. Jaime isn’t a family member. She did not have to visit A and E with a baby carrot stuck up her vagina. She hadn’t been caught on tape and put on some porn site. Her housemates still do not know. If her wanking had been a maritime disaster, it would have been the Mary Celeste rather than the sinking of HM Titanic or MV Wilhelm Gustloff. There were minimal casualties -only Jaime and Brienne sinking beneath the waves of shame – and those who came upon the abandoned ship after the event were reduced to devising far-fetched theories about what could possibly have happened to those onboard, about why Jay Lan (as Brienne’s housemates affectionately called him, in mockery of his number plate -a gift from his brother) had vanished so unexpectedly that day and not been heard of since.

But he is here now all right, with all his knowledge of what her vulva and breasts look like and which model of wand she uses, secrets that Brienne had assumed she would take to the grave. Brienne has always had a vague idea that at some point she might marry. Perhaps when she is in her 50s, and the visual differences between her and her contemporary women are a little less jarring. Her idea of conjugal relations, though, has never included her husband actually seeing her… parts. Her objective was, that should her husband ever have to pick her breasts and vulva out of a police line up of other breasts and vulvas, he would fail miserably. That their sex would not be a visual affair. The bedroom lights would be off. They would be under the duvet. She would keep her T shirt and bra on. Her husband would be old and long-sighted and she would hide his reading glasses before bed. If the _repressed 1950s housewife_ approach failed, she would feign some kinky penchant for doggy-style or blindfolds. It had always seemed to Brienne, that with enough ingenuity, her modesty could be preserved indefinitely. She had, though, reckoned without Jaime Only-One-Knock Lannister. She should have left him to it on that canal towpath. Things would have been much simpler.

“Hello,” he says pleasantly, kissing her on the cheek and stepping past her, apparently not noticing her appalled expression.

“What are you doing here?” she whispers. “It’s Sansa’s hen do. You’re a man.”

“You noticed at last,” he says lightly. “I’m here because I was invited. By Ygritte.”

“Well, it isn’t up to Ygritte to invite you. This isn’t her night,” says Brienne, knowing she is being ridiculous.

“Hang on a minute!” says Jaime. “Sansa isn’t actually getting married -you do know that, don’t you? None of you are getting married. Every month one of you dons a bridal outfit and the rest of you put on your bridesmaid sashes, and then you go out carrying that inflatable penis, get hammered, and get free drinks, free entry and more male attention than you know what to do with. It’s so cynical it’s beautiful.”

“There’s a stripper coming,” says Brienne, in a final attempt to get him to leave.

“Is there?” says Jaime grinning. “Is that why you rushed so eagerly to the door, Brienne? Did you trample all the other girls so you could get to him first?”

Brienne is finding it increasingly hard not to smile. Her lips are twitching like mad, and Jaime is watching them. “Next time,” he says, “you can just ask me. I’ll take my clothes off for you for free,” and then he is gone, sweeping into the lounge, in his red leather jacket and brown slacks, leaving Brienne feeling things that she doesn’t quite understand.

She follows him into the lounge, a room which caused Jaime, a 35-year-old man with his own homogenous house, to visibly flinch the first time he entered it about seven months ago. In general, newcomers are puzzled by the battle of wills going on within this room. It is the spatial equivalent of a meal cooked by four people who have agreed to cook together but have not conferred at all on what the end dish should be. Person 1 throws a jar of toffee sauce and some whipped cream into the bowl, person 2 sees this but still decides to add a fillet of salmon and minty potatoes, person 3 throws in some Coco Pops, and person 4 sees the whole thing is beyond saving anyway, so why not drop in some truffle oil and a fried egg? The result is unpalatable to say the least.

On the walls hang Sansa’s textile landscapes and Arya’s swords and spears. Ygritte’s home-made, solar-powered, miniscule water features bubble away on the mantlepiece and tables, while in the corners and along the windowsills, Margaery’s indoor lemon trees, rose bushes, spider plants, orchids and Weeping Fig trees seemingly reproduce daily, giving the room a verdant, rain forest vibe. Brienne’s signed poster of Kelly Smith is pinned (with glorious disdain for the landlord’s ‘holes in the wall’ embargo) above the fireplace, and there is a life-sized cardboard cutout of Hugh Jackman, topless –and, since the collapse of his stand, spineless too. The girls have had to prop him in a corner to keep him upright, and he now watches them rather voyeuristically from behind the branches of Margaery’s Paradise Palm Tree and a Swiss Cheese Plant. The ‘pervert in the bushes’ effect is only heightened when the girls are dressed as scantily as they are now. There is also a corner settee and then several wobbly-looking chairs that Ygritte has crafted from the random crap she _rescues_ from the local tip -wardrobe doors, plant pots, golf clubs. No one except Ygritte and her friend Tormund ever dares to sit in these chairs. When your fitness is your livelihood, you don’t take risks like that.

There are six built-in oak shelves running the length of one wall. Brienne’s shelf is crowded with the poems of Wheatley, Plath, Dickinson; autobiographies of her sporting heroes; novels of Austen, the Brontës, Elliot, Gaskell, Shelley, Alcott; and history books on the Egyptians, Romans, Aztecs, Vikings, and Native Americans. (“Do you want to live in the past?” Jaime had once asked her, staring at these books. “No,” she had replied. “I’d have had an awful time. It’s hard enough now, but…” “But what?” he’d asked. “I’d like to be -I don’t know,” she had said, because it was true.)

Sansa’s shelf is a library of sewing, quilting and knitting handbooks. ‘Sew your own picnic.’ ‘Knit your own pet/mermaid/ gingerbread house/boyfriend/magical land.’ She is at present knitting a wardrobe of tiny clothes for Jaime’s niece’s toy rabbit. Brienne half expects that one day, Sansa will knit a tiny version of her own self, syphon her soul into it, and will depart into her safe upholstered world of woollen picnics and felt flowers and the kind-looking, knitted boyfriends who line up on her bedroom windowsill, and who would never treat her in the shitty way that her flesh, blood and bone boyfriends have.

Margaery’s shelf is a testimony to her belief in the potential for individualistic triumph despite structural forces of oppression. ‘Lean In.’ ‘Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office.’ ‘Good to Great.’ She has an address book of useful contacts -mostly men, mostly journalists or TV execs -who she occasionally gets in touch with when she needs advancement. If Margaery were a man, she would be David Beckham, living in some warm country, nodding without irony about the commissioning of a golden statue of her, shagging other women while her pretty wife stays faithful, and owning a house with about seven pools. As it is, she rents a house with four of her teammates in Manchester, and her straighteners and curling irons occupy most of the shelf space.

Below this is Ygritte’s ode to a coming apocalypse (nuclear war, climate change, or a meteor hitting earth) in which she intends to not only survive but thrive, taking advantage of the deaths, food shortages and power void by forming a matriarchal, feminist government made up of her, Arya, Brienne, Harriet Wistrich and Susan Faludi. She has books on how to survive acid rain, how to make a fishing rod from a broken umbrella, how to build a canoe from a picnic table, and how to distinguish edible fungi from poisonous. She has books on how to stage a military coup when you haven’t got a military. She has manuals on how to build an underground bunker, a project she has been at work on for some months in the nearby wood after her housemates vetoed her plans to do it in the garden, due to fear of pushing their very tolerant landlord too far. (“You’ll be sorry when the siren goes off and we’ve four minutes to run nearly a mile to the bunker,” Ygritte had grumbled. “Good thing we’re all top-flight athletes,” Brienne had said.)

Then there is Arya’s shelf. What to say of Arya’s shelf, except that it makes Ygritte’s look fairly sane? Beside the Harry Potter series are a line of books on Wicca and magick. There are jars of herbs and powders. There are crystals, candles, ribbons, feathers, leaves, shells, and dead insects which Arya uses to cast charms. There is a shrunken head, and voodoo dolls which Sansa makes for her. There are boy masks which she wears in order to avoid sexual harassment from the dickheads who linger permanently outside The Bay Horse. There are books on how to train dogs and wolves. _Find Your Inner Wolf. Fearing The Fangs And Doing It Anyway. Howl and Be Heard._ Arya’s plan is to have a pack of very fierce wolves which she will set on anyone who pisses her off. Her Plan B is to have a pack of very fierce German Shepherds who she will set on anyone who pisses her off. Then there are books on Thai boxing, Aikido and Judo. Very early every morning, Arya practises the moves on a big rubber mat which she pulls out from under the settee. The thumps, yells and occasional crash of a plant being kicked over drive Margaery - not exactly a morning person- mad.

The finals shelf is the shrine to feminism, a pooled collection ranging from Backlash to Everyday Sexism, from Pimp State to The Female Eunuch, from The Beauty Myth to Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? Brienne has several times found Jaime reading from this shelf, his lip curling in disgust. The first time she caught him, she had thought, ‘Oh, another man who doesn’t like feminists, how refreshing.’ But, as though reading her mind, he had waved the book at her.

“A fourteen-year-old girl upskirted in class,” he’d told her. “She slaps the boy and guess who gets suspended for a week and has to apologise?”

“The girl,” Brienne had responded.

“You’ve read this one?”

“No. But I’ve lived it. We all have.”

Looking at these shelves when she is feeling down can sometimes cause Brienne’s eyes to well up. They are five women, so eager to bend themselves or the world so that they can live in it comfortably. Right now, however, she has more pressing concerns. Jaime has removed his jacket. Margaery and Sansa are hugging him. Ygritte, never one to easily separate affection from aggression, has given him a punch that has brought tears to his eyes, and Arya is cracking open a beer for him. Apparently, he is here to stay.

Brienne lingers in the doorway, desperately wanting to flee upstairs, replace the skirt and sleeveless blouse with a sports bra and running shorts, and go. Pound the pavements and footpaths for a couple of hours. But now Sansa is pushing a shot glass into her hand and dragging her into the centre of the room, where they all down the first of far, far too many shots.

One failed attempt at a jager-train, three tequilas shots, one beer, two jager bombs and a bucketload of gin later, and Arya is ready to roll. Literally. One second, she is standing on the settee, trying to perform the Macarena dance to Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir, the next, she has fallen and is rolling in all her gothic glory on one of Sansa’s incongruous roseleaf patchwork mats.

“No. Black! Black. Everywhere…” cries Sansa, which is seemingly the best she can do in trying to dissuade Arya from smearing black lipstick and mascara across the lovingly crafted mat.

By this point, everyone is hammered. Jaime, five months into his new career as a firefighter, hoists Arya over his shoulder to much applause, but then as no one is quite sure what to do with her next, he puts her down again. At least on the floor, she can fall no lower, and, although none of them is in a particularly rational state of mind as far as supervising her goes, she is probably less likely to come to harm here, with them, than alone in her room.

Jaime and Sansa do the Uma Thurman/John Travolta dance to You Never Can Tell, and look so damn good doing it that Brienne, still replaying Jaime’s line about taking his clothes off “for you,” wonders if he meant the plural you. Maybe he is willing to don his firefighter uniform and undress for this particular group of pretty young girls who might require a stripper for their frequent hen dos, Brienne reaping the benefits of her housemates’ good looks. Though actually, that doesn’t seem likely either. Jaime is too sarcastic and cynical to be able to cavort alluringly while whipping off clothes. Brienne opens herself another beer.

Ygritte is telling her new fella, Jon, who arrived shortly after Jaime, that she is ovulating and as a result has “egg-white vaginal discharge -that’s what they call it on our trackers…” Jon is bearing this rather forced acquaintance with the less sexy elements of female biology quite well, until Margaery butts in with, “Is that why you started making pavlova at 6am today, Ygritte? You are disgusting!” at which point his politely bewildered expression turns to polite panic.

Ygritte guffaws. “I didn’t make it from discharge! But I got up for a piss, saw egg white when I wiped, and just got this massive craving for pavlova.”

“That’s repulsive,” Margaery says. “That’s like me getting my period, deciding I really want some strawberry jam, and then feeding it to everyone else without them knowing why I made it.”

“Why does it matter what I was thinking when I made it?” Ygritte demands. “We’re not Catholics. We don’t believe in transubstantiation. If you made rocky road cos you’d just had a shit that reminded you of it, I’d still be happy to eat it.”

“Well, I WOULD NOT have eaten your pavlova if I’d known it was only there because of your vaginal discharge.” Margaery staggers slightly on her way to procure more wine.

“Do you think this conversation might have passed the boundaries of good taste a while back?” Jaime murmurs into Brienne’s ear. She hadn’t realised he had come so close.

“Oh no. I think this is the kind of conversation that could be had anywhere, with pride,” says Brienne.

He laughs. “Yeah. Look, can we-?” he begins, but Ygritte is staring at them out of bloodshot, drunken eyes, and he breaks off.

“Right,” says Ygritte, pursuing Margaery across the room to the wine. “You remember a month or so ago when I was about to make tea for everyone, and I asked you where Jaime and Brienne were?”

“Not really.”

“Well, you said they were up in her room, and that as you went past the door, you could hear sex noises -him grunting -so he must be playin’ _hide the sausage_ with her.”

“Ygritte!” says Margaery. “I think you should keep-”

“Male grunting?” Jaime says uneasily, turning to Brienne. “What -who does she mean?”

“And that,” continues Ygritte, ignoring him, “gave me the idea for that sausage baked in brie thing, that you and Sansa both said was one of the best things you’d ever had. I’m guessing you’d still eat that again, Marg.”

“So this is a regular thing for you?” Margaery snaps. “You’re always making foods based on bodily secretions or sex acts?”

“I take my inspiration where I can get it,” Ygritte agrees cheerily.

Brienne, about as comfortable and confident right now as a donkey riding a bicycle on a tightrope, can sense Jaime’s eyes on her, waiting for an explanation. Male grunting coming from her room. About a month ago. “Tennis,” she says faintly. “It must have been when we were watching the tennis. Murray and Nadal, remember?”

“Yuur umbarrassin’ them,” scolds Sansa, apparently twenty seconds behind everyone else and only just registering Ygritte’s gaffe. She blunders over to put her arms about Jaime and Brienne.

“It’s just sex!” Ygritte protests. “You were sayin’ the other week it’s obvious they’re at it, and you don’t know why the big secret.”

“Ygritte!” says Jon.

“W-well,” says Sansa, floundering. “I only… meant…”

“They can keep it private if they want to,” says Margaery. “Not everyone feels the need to give graphic accounts of how hairy his arse is and what face he pulled when he came, Ygritte.”

Jon looks worried.

“But we’re- we’re not!” Brienne finally manages, her face scarlet. Her housemates, excepting Arya who is now snoring, turn to stare at her, drawn by the vehemence of her denial. They look to Jaime for confirmation, and when Brienne chances a glance too, his face is blank. He has coloured slightly, but that is probably the drink.

“You _do_ want to though, don’t you?” says Margaery to Jaime, in genuine bemusement. “You stare at her arse every time she turns her back... You must…”

“His face when he was watching her planking that time,” Sansa cackles, before doing a slack-jawed, just-been-bonked-over-the-head-with-a-brick impression of Jaime.

Of all the times her housemates could have done this, they choose now. The first time she has seen Jaime since the Mayday Mayday Masturbation Display. Jesus Fucking Christ. He probably thinks she has planned all this. Letting him see her naked didn’t work, so get Ygritte to invite him round, ply him with drink, and then get her housemates to talk incessantly about him shagging her, until, as with exposure therapy, he becomes acclimatised and thinks, ‘Maybe this isn’t _soo_ bad… Maybe I can just about manage to do it without screaming in horror/having a panic attack/crying hysterically.’

Jaime does looks fairly close to a panic attack. His right hand squeezes his bottle as though he is trying to make crushed glass. His left hand rubs at his stubble in a blatant display of what Margaery’s body language books call “self-soothing.” His lips part, and his eyes dart between Brienne and her friends. He looks so wretchedly nervous that Brienne can’t bear it. Her own embarrassment is nothing when faced with his. She wants to shield him from anything that can make him look so raw, so trapped.

“Friends!” she whispers. She means it to describe her and Jaime’s relationship, but somehow it just sounds like the salutation at the start of a grand ministerial speech _-My fellow Americans! I did not have sexual relations with that woman-_ and Brienne is already cursed with a tendency to outbursts when pissed and passionate. Sobriety means carefully maintained walls. Drunkenness can mean walls tumbling, and words and feelings rushing out like a load of rampaging zoo animals.

“Friends,” she addresses them desperately. “Why do you do this? Why are you always going on about -it’s one thing to say it to me in private -but dragging him into it too- There is nothing. Neither of us wants – Hell will freeze over before anything like that happens. You’re like… like Emma Woodhouse, always trying to matchmake people who don’t want to be together. Just leave him alone.”

She turns to Jaime to give him a sympathetic smile, and instead finds him looking as though he has just been slapped.

“I’m sorry, Brienne,” says Sansa. “I didn’t mean to-” The doorbell goes. “My stable boy!”

The stable boy is everything one incapacitated and four very drunk young women could hope for. He does not fall over Arya’s sleeping form as he enters, he comes with his own boom box, and he is handsome without being so beautiful that he makes them feel plain, something they have all complained of with Jaime.

Jon immediately heads to the kitchen, apparently having no desire to watch Gendry writhe in front of the “girl he’s kind of seeing.” Jaime seems much more reluctant to leave, and stalls for some time. He pours himself another drink, scowls at the Hugh Jackman cutout, starts looking through the playlists on Margaery’s phone, suggests to Brienne that she come and get some fresh air with him in the garden, and when she declines, still too embarrassed to be alone with him, he finally resorts to challenging Ygritte’s feminism. “You don’t believe in men objectifying female bodies and paying to do it, but it’s okay for women to do it to men?”

Brienne, Sansa and Margaery all mentally assume the crash position, and sure enough, Ygritte lands hard. “You know what, Jay Lan? When it’s women committin’ 98% of sex crime and 90% of violent crime, we’ll talk about female entitlement to other people’s bodies, okay? When we’ve got a Donna Trump in the White House and a Harriet Weinstein in film and a Maxine Clifford in PR and a Jenny Saville at the BBC, then we can think about toxic femininity. Until then, you go and bollock your fellow men, not us.” Jaime slumps away, tail between legs, hackles down, mane mangled.

“I’d love a toastie, Jaime,” Brienne calls after him, to try and bolster his self-esteem. Jaime cannot cook. His mother died of cancer when he was ten and Tywin Lannister wasn’t the type of daddy to spend Saturday afternoons baking cookies and stuffing cannoli shells with his two little sons. They had a housekeeper, Patricia, who Jaime and Tyrion had disliked for the profound reasons that she breathed loudly and blew her nose overly politely. Also, that she was not their mother. Jaime never asked her to teach him to cook, had in deed spurned her few attempts at nurture which he deemed worthless because she only cared because she was paid to. The consequences of that decision remain today. Under Jaime’s green eyes, lasagne congeals, milk curdles, potatoes burn and cakes sink. His toasties, however, are divine, probably because of this very culinary ignorance. He uses coronary-inducing levels of cheese and butter that would horrify a normal person who understands that you do not need half a vat of oil to fry an onion.

The rest of the night is rather a blur to Brienne.

Gendry puts on “I’m too sexy” and begins to strip, at which point Arya wakes, sits up and gazes at him. There is a fair bit of excited discussion from Sansa and Margaery about how this is exactly like one of those miracles when people who have been in comas for years suddenly wake up at the sound of a long lost love’s voice or a Bryan Adams song. Sansa views it as proof that Arya has found her soulmate.

Jaime brings Brienne her toastie, and everyone is so jealous that he is commissioned to make several more.

A decision is made to stay in instead of heading for the clubs, and Ygritte decides to take Jon Snow into the woods to see her bunker -and presumably christen it -while everyone else plays Twister.

Jaime somehow burns his right wrist on the toastie-maker; Brienne steers him to the sink and, rather unnecessarily, holds his hand under the water. The motion of the water splashing over his beautiful golden forearm is curiously hypnotic. She gazes at it for a full minute, her mind drifting and filling with nothing but this vision, this sound, this combination of warm flesh and icy water. It is a shock when Jaime speaks, she had almost forgotten he was there.

“What did you mean before,” he asks, “when you said they were always going on about us?”

Brienne can’t look up to meet his eye. “Oh, nothing, you know what they’re like.”

"You're not going to tell me then?"

"There's nothing to tell. Just... There's nothing."

“Do they think I fancy you?”

Brienne drops his hand as though he had bitten her. She tries to back away, but he grabs her arm before she can. “All right, all right,” he says gently. “Promise I won’t say another word.”

“Get your arm back under the water,” Brienne tells him gruffly. He obeys and Brienne, head bowed, can feel his eyes fixed on her. Eyes tracing every flaw, every ugly feature that Nature (Brienne would never see it as Mother Nature, no mother would be so cruel) had seen fit to fling at her, in a brief moment when it wasn’t driving dodos to extinction or making lions rip antelopes to pieces. No doubt Jaime is marvelling at how anyone could believe that he would look at her with desire. Her. Good grief. He is still holding her arm, and Brienne has a brief flash of defiance. Her eyes move up to catch him in the act of critiquing her, to shame him, to show him she does not care if her face pleases him or not, she is more than a doll. Instead she finds him gazing at her so heatedly that she quails under the intensity of it.

“God, I love you,” he whispers.

The words seem to shock him as much as they do her; his eyes widen as soon as they have left his mouth.

Those words, coming from Jaime, will not compute for Brienne. Her usual response, on being told she is loved, is to say, “Love you too, Mum,” or “You too, Dad. Speak soon.” She cannot, though, casually tell Jaime she loves him too and will speak to him later. She cannot, apparently, speak at all. In fairy tales, princesses are usually rendered helpless and inert (in true misogynistic tradition) by some evil witch or stepmother, and it is the prince, the man, who breaks the spell. Jaime, never exactly one for convention, has obviously decided to put a twist on this time-honoured trope. He has put the spell on her. She is rooted to the spot. She is burning up and speechless. No! She _will_ speak.

Waking alone the next morning, her head pounding, a wave of nausea at the back of her throat, she cannot quite remember what her response had been, but she thinks it was something along the lines of, “You idiot. You really are drunk, aren’t you?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This takes place about five weeks after Brienne and Jaime meet for the first time. That's about seven months before the events of the last chapter.

Jaime did not believe in souls or an afterlife or ghosts. He did not believe in using the human heart as a metaphor for love. It was an ugly organ with ventricles, valves and atriums. More like a Roman villa or air conditioning unit than the source of romance. Sure, it beat a little faster when you saw the woman you loved. It beat a lot faster when you made love to her. But it also beat fast when you ran for a bus. Or had too many energy drinks. Or had a panic attack at your desk at work. And it was smaller in women than in men. If a heart were truly an indicator of love, Joanna Lannister’s heart would have been twenty times the size of Tywin’s. Her torso would have ballooned to contain it.

Despite all this, Jaime insisted on viewing that night on the towpath in spectral, metaphorical terms. The canal became the River Styx. Brienne was Jaime’s Guardian Angel. She had personally done battle for Jaime’s soul with the Grim Reaper, had disarmed him of his scythe and sent him fleeing. Without Brienne, Jaime’s soul would be floating, Casper-style, robbed of all carnal pleasures: eating fish and chips, all salty and greasy, from Don’s Chippie; drinking a cold beer; head massages; orgasm. He could still have all these because of Brienne. And that was the problem. The moment when a life is saved or taken is huge. Serial killers know it. They slay their victims, then make off with various tasteful items of memorabilia - jewellery, underwear, eyeballs, scalps, uteruses -reminding themselves of that moment when they were a god. Brienne, meanwhile, had pressed Jaime’s life back into his hands but had still taken her trophy -his heart. She didn’t even seem to know she had done it.

“You were already winning the fight,” she said when he said she had saved his life. Her eyes had instinctively flitted over his muscled arms and chest then, and Jaime had felt his insides lurch.

“They had a knife.”

“Well, at most I prolonged your life.” Trust Brienne to drop the cheery reminder that he would still die at some point.

Jaime had been to both of Brienne’s home matches since that night. His sister-in-law had told him men were less intimidating when accompanied by a child or a dog, so he had taken along his niece, hopeful that she would act as the magic ingredient to make his attendance wholesome and sweet rather than frightening and creepy: this outing was not a stakeout. Jaime was just an uncle, taking his niece to watch women’s football, inspiring her, showing her that anything boys could do girls could do better -Well, actually just showing her that anything boys could do, girls could do on less pay, to less acclaim, and without the theatrics or feigning of injury, but still… She’d probably already learnt that; Laia was an old soul. She treated her father as though he were a young and slightly incompetent PA, and Jaime loved listening to her orders disguised as requests. “Tyrion, could you get me a coffee please? Milk, one sugar.” “Tyrion, my Wendy house needs fixing. Will you manage to have it done before tomorrow evening?” She was less business-like with Shae, seeming to sense that her mother’s bad childhood meant she needed tenderness. With great forbearance, Laia allowed herself to be burdened with all the things Shae had missed out on: teddy bear backpacks, a pink bedroom, a surplus of princess films, fruit chopped and arranged to make smiley faces. Shae was also permitted the intimacy of being called ‘mum’ -to her face at least. Laia accepted Jaime’s offer to take her to the football with the same patronising acquiescence, understanding that this was for her uncle’s benefit, not hers. Afterwards, they waited outside the stadium so that Laia could get autographs from women she hadn’t heard of two weeks before. The women had been kind to her, though Jaime had sensed a mixture of looks towards him, some doing doe-eyes at him, a couple looking wary.

And now, almost five weeks after the canal incident, Jaime was in the home of his Guardian Angel. To be sure, Brienne, dressed in army pants, a white vest and with her half-shaved haircut, looked more like GI Joe than the tinselled, befrocked creature that Laia was forced to act in every nativity play. It made sense though, Jaime thought, that a _guardian_ angel would be a little more militarised than a common messenger angel. Maybe a jetpack instead of gauze wings. A machine gun instead of a wand. Perhaps a guardian angel would have stopped God impregnating the Virgin Mary, or escorted her to the abortion clinic, rather than simply dropping off the pregnancy test results and then fluttering off to summon a variety of random postpartum visitors.

Brienne was making a cake. Some kind of chocolate, salted fudge and cream concoction which did not so much resemble a cake as a landmark -or an appointment with diabetes. It was very different from the plain and sensible jam tarts that Patricia used to churn out every baking day, and which Jaime and Tyrion, and Cersei, when she wasn’t at her own parents’ home, would lob at one another. Piping bags, edible glitter sprays and sugar glass hadn’t been part of Patricia’s repertoire. Brienne was so steady, so self-sufficient, that Jaime sometimes forgot she was only twenty-two, a whole thirteen years younger than him. He forgot that she was a member of the freakshake generation, veering wildly between devouring six million calories of unicorn-themed sugar one moment, and ‘clean eating’ the next. If Tyrion had been here, watching Shae make this cake, there was no doubt where his thoughts would be. Mentally he would be drizzling chocolate across her tits, spooning whipped cream onto her… But Jaime had never seen the connection between food and sex. It was enough to sit in this big, cosy kitchen, talking to Brienne about joining the Fire Service, occasionally scraping out the bowls she passed him, and licking spoons and whisks, as though he were five-years-old again.

Before him lay the interview. Three page of text and several photos in the most widely-read Sunday supplement. It would go out in two days’ time, but Jaime had demanded an early copy from his brother and had brought it for her to look at. _“I understood the offside rule before I could read.” Adam Marbrand meets Man United striker and England hopeful Brienne Tarth and discovers what it takes to make it big in women’s football._

Brienne had been embarrassed when Jaime suggested it, two days after that first night. “No,” she had said, over the phone. “I’m grateful but it wouldn’t be fair. It’s cronyism. Look at the state of our world. Men rewarded for incompetence because they’ve got the right contacts. I can’t do that.”

“It’s not remotely similar!” Jaime had spluttered. “Women’s football suffered exactly because of men like that. This is a chance to take a step towards where you deserve to be. A series of interviews with you and other female footballers. Possible TV coverage of the WSL and cup games if my brother can-” He had just stopped himself from saying ‘pull some strings.’ “If he can get the rights,” he finished rather lamely.

“This isn’t the way,” she had said firmly. “It’s how injustice perpetuates itself. Someone believes their cause is worthy, and they think it’s justifiable to pull strings to achieve it. If I hadn’t helped you, your brother would not be willing to arrange this. I can’t work in a corrupt system.”

She had ended the call, and Jaime had fumed for the three hours that it took for her to ring back. Jaime logically knew it wasn’t possible for a ringtone to have a grudging tone (just as he logically knew it wasn’t really possible that his sat nav sounded annoyed when he took a wrong turn), but he swore that his phone rang aggressively when Brienne did call him back. She had told her housemates of his offer, and they were all raging with her for turning it down. Even Ygritte, a radical, had thought it worthwhile to “work with the establishment this once, for the sake of our sisters. We can bring it down later.” Brienne, apparently not immune to melodrama at times, said she felt that she was “sacrificing her ethics on the altar of friendship.” Jaime, in kinder terms, told her to grow up.

All that was left for Jaime to do was to tell Tyrion, and to ensure that Adam Marbrand included a question on whether or not Brienne was seeing anyone. Google had offered up nothing, and Jaime had thought crossly of all the time he had wasted scrolling past articles on Ashley Cole banging a hairdresser before vomiting all over her car; John Terry trying to win his missus back after cheating AGAIN; James Vardy’s fairy tale wedding with -Shock, horror! -a woman with children from three different men; Wayne Rooney and Peter Crouch shagging prostitutes while their wives were pregnant; Ryan Giggs’ injunction; Jesse Lingard romping with a busty single mum; etc., etc.. And yet he couldn’t even find whether Brienne had a boyfriend. _Or girlfriend_ , Tyrion’s goading voice said in his head.

Jaime wasn’t sure how to word the question himself, even as he and Brienne seemed to be slipping from acquaintances to friends. Marbrand - dickhead -had shied away from outright asking Brienne. “Are men threatened by you?” he’d asked. “You’ve done what most boys dream of but will never achieve -playing football for your country. Has that ever caused problems with the men in your life?” “Yes,” Brienne had responded. “I focus on the ones who are supportive. If I dwelled on every nasty comment, I’d never get out of bed in the morning.” Nothing about a partner. Brienne might never have the prestige, the vulgar house and the brash cars that her male counterparts had, but she wasn’t about to throw away her one advantage -privacy.

The horror movie of Jaime’s own romantic past was splattered all over the internet for anyone with an interest in Tywin Lannister’s son to see. Leatherface. Jigsaw. The girl from _The Ring_. Cersei. Jaime was the bit-part girl at the beginning of the film, exploring some deserted house, hearing a noise, and setting off blithely up the stairs to investigate while the audience groans, “For fuck’s sake. No.” Somewhere near the end, she would be discovered by the main characters, strapped to a chair, gagged, horribly mutilated and yet somehow still alive. The main characters would then either be killed or forced to flee from the villain, and bit-part girl would have to gnaw off her own hand or saw off a leg to get free. That, Jaime thought, nicely summed up his relationship with Cersei. The audience wouldn’t ever quite know what had happened during the period of captivity, but they could guess it wasn’t ice cream, bunnies, and jaunts to Disneyland.

At that moment, Margaery Tyrell, Sansa and Arya Stark, and Ygritte Spear’ife all trooped into the room. Jaime had met them only briefly before, when they signed Laia’s football outside the ground. Ygritte was wearing only bra and knickers but did not seem at all embarrassed by Jaime’s presence. They politely greeted Jaime and then, with far more enthusiasm, greeted the cake, cooing over it as though it were a Golden Retriever with a limp.

“Margaery, this cake or sex with Alicia Vikander?” said Ygritte after some moments of doting.

“In her Tomb Raider outfit?” said Margaery. She had big blue eyes that might have seemed pretty if Jaime hadn’t spent the past hour with Brienne’s eyes, only the more alluring for their shy reluctance to meet his. And shit, now he was having a Tomb Rider inspired fantasy. Brienne as Lara Croft, aiming her pistols at him and demanding he strip. Jesus Christ, he was thirsty. 

“If you like.”

“The sex. Brienne would make me another cake at some point, wouldn’t you, Brienne?”

“If you’ll stop using my bedroom as your personal dressing room,” said Brienne, “I’ll make you as many cakes as you want.” _Her bedroom. Why did she have to mention her bedroom?_ Brienne had left the kitchen then, and Jaime had wondered if he should follow. He had heard her on the stairs and promptly decided against it. He didn’t trust himself not to do something rushed and reckless right now.

“So who’s the Jane Austen fan?” he asked. “Brienne said you take it in turns to choose what to watch.” He scanned the four women and settled on Sansa. She looked like the type who would prance innocently around Meryton or Bath and either be seduced and ruined by Mr Wickham or marry Mr Tilney.

Jaime had only been invited to this weekend’s Watchathon on account of his professed fondness for Jane Austen. He had read them because his mother had loved them, and he had liked them for their unashamed focus on love. Austen wasn’t that interested in politics or war. She knew relationships were just as worthy of focus. Jaime was sure Brienne hadn’t really expected him to accept her offhand invitation when they had discussed weekend plans via text.

“Brienne,” said Sansa. “She’s the romantic in this house.”

Jaime had taken a while to absorb that, and Margaery said, “That surprises you?”

“The first time I met her, she saved me from three muggers and dived into a canal. She plays football for a living. She has-” he gestured to his own hair, to indicate Brienne’s half shaved head. “I wouldn’t have thought she’d find women being forced into corsets and passivity romantic.”

“She’s shy,” barked Ygritte. “Of course she wants to be wooed old-style. You men today are lazy as fuck. Back in the old days, we had to look pretty, do the housework and look after the bairns. Now you expect us to do all that on top of workin’ fulltime and askin’ you out and chasin’ you for dates. Equality, my arse. You’ve just dumped a load of extra work on us.”

“She means,” says Sansa, patting Ygritte gingerly on the back, “Brienne is quite shy. You can see why she might like the idea of being forbidden from making the first move, knowing a man will do it, will offer marriage instead of -well.”

The four women exchanged dark looks.

“Right,” said Jaime, looking casually out of the window. “So er… has she… is she currently being _wooed_ by anyone?”

If he had announced his intention to paint himself in green slime and decamp to Mars, he could not have got the girls’ attention more fully. Sansa and Ygritte exchanged very unsubtle smirks, but Margaery and Arya bristled. Jaime felt annoyed. They knew nothing of him except what was reported of his family in the not-at-all trashy headlines of the redtops. Tywin’s Tawdry Tryst with Tart! Dwarf’s Drug Disgrace. Baratheon Betrayal: Cersei Cheats on Jaime AGAIN!

Jaime was on his best behaviour though, determined his tongue should be blunter than Donald Trump’s intellect. _Don’t piss off her friends._

“She’s single,” Margaery had said in the same way one might say “she’s dead.” With finality. With a confidence that this wasn’t a state which Jaime could change. “And, no offence," Margaery continued, "but she’s had more than her share of dickheads trying to get in her pants. She might seem innocent, but she is _not_ easy prey. I’d hate for you to waste your time if that's what you're thinking.”

Jaime was instantly fired up, but suddenly Brienne was in the room again, and he was forced to bite back his retort and sit seething on his stool. He wondered if he had chocolate around his mouth; he made a subtle attempt to lick his lips, just in case.

Ygritte was eying him now. “Margaery used to have a huge crush on your ex,” she said. “Used to buy the Daily Mail and cut out pictures of her. If you were in them, she’d cut you off or scribble over your face.”

“Cersei?!”

“Years ago,” said Margaery defensively. “I was 15.”

Brienne, perhaps sensing a certain tension -or perhaps feeling the rage burning in Jaime as though he were a large kiln, all his romantic resolutions baking, hardening inside him -came and stood beside him. “What are you talking about?” she asked sweetly.

“Margaery had a schoolgirl crush on Jaime’s ex.”

“Who’s that?” Brienne had asked.

Ygritte pulled out her phone, typed, and showed Brienne. It was a pap shot of Jaime and Cersei arguing in the street like fishwives. Of course it was. “You really don’t follow news, do you, Brie? Her. Cersei Baratheon. You not heard of her?”

Jaime had only a second to see Brienne’s face before she turned away. “No... She's lovely. Shall we take the cake through, and start watching?”

After that, she wouldn’t even give him a split second of eye contact, though Jaime found that his eyes were on her at least as much as they were on Pride and Prejudice.

*

They had just got to Darcy’s first proposal when Jaime became aware that something very unromantic was happening in the back garden. On the other side of the French windows stood a wizened, goblin-like man. He wore brown sandals, one of which was tied with fraying string; a billowing white shirt -open to reveal a crepe tummy; a straw hat of the kind that can be seen on donkeys at the seaside; and a pair of brown bloomers with some compromising stains around the crotch area. The real focal point though, the centrepiece upon this table of eccentricity, was not the outfit, or the cobwebby hair, long and matted enough to house an expansive population of spiders; it was the penis that flopped through the open flies of the bloomers. The man was fondling it, as though trying to coax some small nocturnal animal into consciousness. He seemed oblivious to Jaime, his focus was entirely on the five young women.

“Er,” said Jaime, and he gestured to the window. “Is he a -a friend of yours?”

Five pairs of eyes slid to the window and Jaime watched with interest to see what the reactions would be. Brienne did her wonderfully expressive eyeroll. Ygritte began to laugh. The others grimaced. Apparently, a strange old man entering their garden in order to fondle himself at the French windows was unpleasant, but not a surprising occurrence.

Sansa sighed and paused the TV. “Right,” she said, “whose turn is it this time? Brienne and Margaery?”

“Why can you never lock the gate, Ygritte?” snapped Arya. “Do you like having the Walder-Frey-spunk filter effect across our windows?”

Ygritte, still laughing, pulled out her phone and began to dial. Brienne and Margaery exchanged grim looks before rising from the settee. Brienne headed for a box of rubber gloves that sat on the shelf, snapped two of them on with matronly efficiency, and braced herself as though ready to do surgery on something large, feral and unanaesthetised. Margery checked that Brienne was ready and then made for the door and unlocked it.

“Mr Frey, you really can’t keep doing this,” Jaime heard her say in that plummy voice. She sounded, Jaime thought, like someone at a garden party reprimanding a child for spitting on the cakes, but trying to keep the fury from her tone because the brat’s indulgent parents were in hearing. “I don’t want to have to call the police.”

“Your gate was unlocked,” the old man said jovially to Margaery’s breasts, apparently under the illusion they were the ones scolding him. “I think you like me visiting you really.”

“No,” said Margaery, throwing a dirty look at Ygritte. “We don’t really like your _visits_. Your daughter thinks it isn’t safe for you to be wandering about. She worries you could be hit by a car or-”

“If bloody only,” Brienne muttered.

Sansa caught Jaime’s bemused look. “It’s an act,” she whispered. “Walder Frey was always a dirty perv. Acts senile now so he can get away with things he couldn’t ten years ago.”

The old man suddenly seemed to see Jaime. With a speed that belied his frail demeanour, he sidestepped Margaery, and made it into the lounge. “Which one’s yours then?” he demanded of Jaime. “Which one bounces on your todger at night?”

Beside an appalled Jaime, Arya snorted with inappropriate laughter. Brienne began to approach. “Mr Frey, Ygritte is ringing your daughter to come and make sure you’re okay.”

“That miserable bitch?” said the charming old man.

Brienne ignored this. “Margaery and I are going to take you home now and-”

“And?” said the old man in a suggestive voice. He began to waggle his penis between his fingers, whether consciously or not, Jaime couldn’t tell. “I had a big lass like you work in my shop. Worked that sausage machine like she was born to do it! Could fillet a breast faster than any of the men. But those beef curtains -that’s what happens when a woman takes a lot of pork up her! Never bothered me though!” He leered at Brienne, the tip of a slimy tongue flickering between his lips.

Brienne caught Jaime’s eye and looked utterly humiliated. Jaime wanted to floor the old git, but settled for diverting his attention. “Were you a butcher?”

“Had two shops in Leeds,” said Walder Frey, with all the self-importance with which one might say, ‘I founded Amazon.’ “Yorkshire Ripper used to get his meat from me, you know,” he continued.

“Lovely,” said Jaime.

“Nice fellow he was,” said Walder fondly. “Shame about what he did to all those whores. I prefer to leave my women screaming for other reasons,” he cackled.

“I think it’s time for you to go home now,” said Brienne. “We’ve told Walda we’ll wait with you until she gets there.”

“This shouldn’t be your job,” Jaime said to her. “Hasn’t he got carers? Social workers?”

Five contemptuous pairs of eyes alighted on Jaime. “Well,” said Margaery. “Proof, if any were needed, that austerity doesn’t touch Lannisters. Why fund public services when you can force a bunch of women to do the work for free? You’ll notice it’s his daughter who’ll drive round to see him now, not his sons.”

“Been scraping every baked bean out of the tin while you’ve been on sick leave have you, Jaime?” said Brienne, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Pawning the TV to pay for your gas?”

“No,” Jaime admitted. “I’m-”

But Walder Frey, tired of a conversation which now focussed on Jaime rather than himself, made a sudden lunge. “They say anymore than a handful’s a waste,” he said, as his left hand shot towards Arya’s breast, and his right went for Brienne’s. Both stepped back just in time, and Brienne snared both the old man’s hands, indelibly infused with Essence of Penis, in her own rubber-clad ones. Well, at least Jaime knew what the rubber gloves were for.

Jaime was now well beyond the stage of horrified fascination. He would not have Brienne sitting unprotected in this old shit’s house. Or Margaery. But definitely not Brienne. He took the old man’s arms and frog marched him to the door. It occurred to him that perhaps this was his and Brienne’s fate. That whenever they spent significant time together, it must involve some element of farce -muggers, sex pests, police involvement. They were star-crossed. Who needed warring families when you had this level of absurdity following you about?

“Where does he live?” he snapped, turning back to Brienne.

“Margaery and I can take him,” said Brienne, with an asperity that riled Jaime further. He ignored her and set off with Walder. He got him out of the side gate, down the drive and onto the pavement before Brienne caught up.

“It’s that one,” she pointed across the street to a house that, with its sagging gutters, jungle of weeds, and filthy windows, could only have belonged to Walder Frey. “But _I’ll_ take him. You don’t want to be doing this.”

This enraged Jaime even more. He hadn’t expected a trophy, a medal, or even an unlaminated certificate, but he would have liked some credit. An acknowledgment that no, he didn’t want to be doing this, but that he would because he was a gentleman deep down and would rather it fell to him than Brienne or her friends. Hell, if she had just accepted his help without arguing - that would have been enough.

“Oh, I do!” he declared with heavy sarcasm. “I _do_ want to be doing this. This is exactly what I was hoping for when I came round tonight. That some incontinent old pervert would break in, systematically sexually harass everyone in the house while clutching at his fetid old cock, and then that I would have the very great honour of escorting him home after he’d tried to molest you. Perhaps he’ll even give me a kiss on the doorstep. Invite me in for coffee. Then my dreams will really come true.”

He stopped then. Brienne was regarding him through unsure, half-amused eyes. Oh dear. Jaime had told himself, as he donned his tightest T shirt earlier, that tonight was not a date. He was simply going to watch a film, in her house. Her friends would be there. She’d never flirted with him. She didn’t seem to notice when he tried to flirt with her. It wasn’t a date. But some part of him must have thought he could make some kind of move tonight. Else why would he just have flung a load of date imagery at her? Why would he be so rankled that he and Brienne had had more physical contact with this repulsive old fart than with each other?

“Thank you for helping me,” said Brienne more gently. “It’s this way.” She led him up the steps. Walder Frey had apparently had the presence of mind to close and lock his front door when he had set off on his little excursion earlier, and he produced his key now, grudgingly allowing Jaime entry because he saw that the two came as a package deal and he wanted some “pussy” in his house.

The owner of the pussy was less than pleased to be referred to in such terms, and it took Jaime’s reminder of the promise to Walda to convince her that she should come in. “I won’t let him hurt you,” he had murmured to her, thrilled by the intimacy of making such a promise to her. She hadn’t even argued that she could look after herself, had just held his gaze, before allowing him to lead her in.

Jaime and Brienne spent the next half hour alternately exchanging scandalised smirks and shaking with horrified laughter. First, Walder rang his son and there was a long and very hostile conversation about whether said son had stolen an ancient heirloom -a bronze lizard. The conversation came to an end when Brienne suddenly spotted the bronze lizard sitting on the mantlepiece, and Walder, rather than apologising to his son, called him a cunt and put the phone down. Then he made himself some tea in a dirty old pewter kettle which he set on a faulty gas ring. The only way to light the ring was to throw lit matches at it, and Walder, predicatably, burnt two fingers before the task was accomplished. He did not offer either of his guests a drink -which was fine with Jaime; when he got home, he intended to disinfect himself with the same rigour that he would apply if he had just encountered the Black Death pandemic. Finally, the old man put on a VHS. Jaime assumed it would be something about the war or a recording of the Antiques Roadshow, but no. A buxom, peroxide blonde woman was having a shower, completely neglecting to scrub her armpits and her neck in favour of lathering up a storm on her tits. Her doorbell rang, she rinsed off, threw on a filmy dressing gown and some stilettos -"Yes, she'd definitely forgo knickers in favour of heels," said Brienne- before opening her door to -who else? The plumber. Thankfully Walda arrived before any more of this spectacle could play out.

Staggering back across the road, hands brushing, both of them weak from laughter, Jaime was forced to admit to himself that thirty minutes spent together in the house of a pervert was probably more of a bonding experience than any of the more conventional activities he could have thought of. Bowling, dinner, a romantic walk -none of them could really have broken down social barriers in quite the same way that half an hour with Walder Frey had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got delayed doing this chap. Thought I had it finished, then realised I didn't like it at all, but then a holiday and illness meant I got delayed in reworking it. Frankly I'm still not happy with it now, so I'm sorry if it disappointed.


	5. Chapter 5

Family tradition dictates that two days after Sansa’s fake hen do, Brienne meets her brother Gal at Manchester Airport and they fly out to Crete. Their parents (divorced, but on relatively good terms) have a villa just outside Nippos and every year in June, the family congregates there for ten days. This year, Brienne’s youngest sister Alysanne, in the teenage phase of being mortified to be seen anywhere with her parents, has remained at their mother’s home, but 18-year-old Dianna is there.

They climb down into the Kourtaliotiko Gorge, wander through olive groves, hire pedalos and watch turtles on Lake Kournas, float in the pool, and eat far too much Sfakianopita. Brienne tries very hard not to think of football, or Jaime -with middling success. She cannot quite forget his face when he said he loved her. Nor the way it altered when she swatted his words away, as though they were a pesky fly. He doesn’t text her, and by the second day she has turned off her phone to stop the compulsive checking. She knows she could text first, but that’s never how it’s been. Always Jaime initiates, Brienne responds. And since that first night, he hasn’t gone a day without messaging her. The idea of shaking up the dynamics when he is behaving oddly makes her feel quite anxious.

By the fourth day, however, she is ready to flout tradition. What is tradition anyway? Just people doing the same dumbarse stuff over and over. Burning ‘witches’, hunting foxes, bringing trees into the house in December. It takes only seven drafts before she has a message which meets her exacting standards for both humour and sense of purpose. She sends him a video from a day ago of two escaped goats swimming merrily around their pool while Dianna squeals with laughter in the background. She captions it, “Mingling with the locals: The Tarth family, doing their bit to counter British stereotypes concerning unfriendliness and reluctance to integrate, by holding an impromptu pool party.”

Then she sends a follow-up: “I now speak fluent Goatese. So much for the English never bothering to learn any other languages. Hope you’re having a good week and rescuing lots of cats from up trees. You’re not going to that bakery for breakfast anytime soon, are you? X”

He doesn’t respond. Brienne checks her phone. Tries to read her book. Goes postal on Gal when he uses up the last of her sun cream. Checks her phone. Glares at her mother and father – the betrayed Charlotte teasing the womanising Selwyn as though she didn’t have every reason to hate him for walking out twelve years ago. That night Brienne’s skin is so burnt and painful that she cannot sleep and chooses instead to plough up and down the pool while the bats fly above. She has a vague idea that Dracula could shapeshift into a bat. She knows she has been awake too long when she starts imagining Jaime as Dracula as a bat, waiting for her to leave the pool so he can transform and suck blood from her virginal neck.

Jaime replies the next evening. 37 bloody hours after Brienne texted him. “I’m not. Enjoy the rest of your holiday.” No kiss. No acknowledgement of her joke. No enquiry about what she wanted him to get from the bakery on the off-chance he did pop by. Just an implication that he would not hear from her again before the end of her holiday. It hurts and she reads it again and again, trying to rationalise why it isn’t that bad, and failing. She types out three replies asking if he is okay, but deletes them all before she can send them.

On the flight home, Brienne decides something. She is 23 years old. If she is lucky (if she doesn’t get injured, if this plane doesn’t crash, if she doesn’t lose a leg in a shark attack, if she doesn’t end up in prison for murdering Walder Frey – so many ways life could unravel), she has around another twelve years of playing football. The literature-loving part of her is whispering ominously about all the characters who meet their downfall through ambition – Macbeth, Victor Frankenstein, Richard III, those fellas in The Prestige – but the sportswoman part pushes that down. She writes a list. 1) She will be top scorer this season in the WSL. 2) She will be called up to the England senior squad and will play in the Euros next Summer. 3) She will play in at least two World Cups. 4) England will win one of those World Cups. 5) She will win the Golden Boot. 6) She will win the Golden Ball. 7) She will be signed by Lyon.

These aren’t just dreams now; they are targets. And if she doesn’t meet them, she has failed.

*

Margaery is not happy. She is accustomed to being woken at ungodly hours by Arya, who, come hell or high water, _will_ practise her martial arts every day at 6am. She is also used to being woken by Ygritte who has a BB gun and an alarming tendency to take potshots from her window at the birds who are being particularly raucous during the dawn chorus. But Ygritte is camping down at the bunker with Jon (and, according to her typically graphic texts, getting eaten out so much that she can ‘hardly stand up anymore’). And Arya and Sansa left for their parents’ home yesterday, screeching off down the road in Sansa’s Mini, having a vicious argument about whether to listen to Metallica or Britney (bitch). And yet Margaery is awake, staring at a clock that reads 06.37, while outside a ball bounces again and again.

When, in the name of God, did Brienne become inconsiderate? Is this some kind of conspiracy? A pact between her housemates that Margaery must be kept permanently sleep-deprived because, at full power, she would just be too potent, a complete world-beater? It had been truly sad just how excited she had been about this lie-in. She had washed her silk sheets yesterday. She had brought up the coffee machine and set it to come on at 10.30. She had bought croissants and her and Brienne’s favourite honey.

Margaery considers hurling the coffee machine out of the window at Brienne, but Brienne looks so glum right now that the greater punishment seems to be to let her go on living. Margaery sighs, steps away from the window, pulls on her dressing gown and goes down to the back garden where Brienne is “working on her left foot.”

“But why?” says Margaery, sitting down on the swing-seat and opening a can of coke.

Brienne looks at her as though she is very stupid. “Because it’s my weak foot. I missed two sitters with it against West Ham. We should have won that game.”

“No, I mean why now?” says Margaery, resisting the urge to tap her watch. “Why not wait until pre-season starts up? We’re on holiday.”

“Because I want to be the best,” says Brienne simply. “I want people to think of me the way they think of Marta or Hegerberg or Rapinoe. And I’ve already left it too late. I’m 23!”

Margaery laughs. Brienne sounds like an Austen character. _23 and unmarried! What will become of me?_ Brienne glares, and Margaery adopts a soothing tone. “You _will be_ one of the best. You were joint second top scorer this season.”

“Yes, _second_ ,” says Brienne with disdain. “I’ve ordered a sled too. I need to get faster. Want to come to the park with me later?”

“I really don’t,” says Margaery. “Just chill. You’ve been back less than a day. Besides, isn’t your boyfriend coming round today? How’s he coped with you being 2,500 miles away from him for ten whole days?”

Brienne flushes furiously and begins to do keepie uppies again. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

Margaery watches her. Brienne is never exactly comfortable with this line of conversation, but there is a special kind of tension today. She waits and finally Brienne speaks. “He texted once, under duress, the whole time I was away.”

A raindrop lands on Margaery’s head. “Probably thought you didn’t want to be pestered.”

“No, it wasn’t that.”

“Well, did you ask him what was up?”

Another raindrop. “No.”

“Oh, for goodness' sake.”

“Girls.” A head protrudes from the open upstairs window of the house next door. “I’m sure your love lives are fascinating, but I was having a really good murder mystery dream. Thanks to you, I’ll never find out who did it now.”

“It was the creepy kid,” Brienne calls, at the same time as Margaery says, “It was you! You’re an unreliable dreamer!”

“Oh, very cute.”

“Sorry, Karsi,” Margaery says. “Let’s go in. The weather’s turning anyway.”

Margaery warms croissants and they eat them with butter and honey at the kitchen table. Brienne is checking seemingly every weather forecast in existence, trying to find one that will promise her a dry afternoon for sled training at the park.

“Why _didn’t_ you ask him what was up?” Margaery asks. She doesn’t like seeing Brienne this antsy. The have been friends for nine years, since they were at City’s academy together, and Margaery has only seen Brienne bricking it like this three or four times. This one is probably a 6 on the Brickter Scale. “Come on, you’ve woken me at stupid o’clock. Sansa isn’t here giggling, Ygritte isn’t here… being Ygritte.”

“I was worried about what he’d say if I asked,” Brienne admits quietly.

“Why? Did you fall out before you left or something?”

“Not exactly.”

“Ohhh… He made a move, didn’t he?”

“No, of course not,” says Brienne, but her face is now so hot that Margaery thinks she could probably heat the remaining croissants on it, were she so inclined.

“What did he do? Did he kiss you?”

“No.” Margaery waits and Brienne looks at some more weather reports, presumably to calm herself. Brienne is too sweet for the cut-throat world of Twitter, or even just news: her ‘fill a moment, and end up down a rabbit hole’ time is spent on weather and shipping forecasts, and looking at the times of tides and sunrises and sunsets. At last she says rather crossly, “He told me he loved me.”

Margaery laughs, not hugely surprised. “He doesn’t do things by halves, does he?” He could have asked Brienne out for dinner. Or held her hand. Or tried to kiss her. But no. Nothing that casual with Jay Lan. At least he’d held back from proposing. But then in fairness to him, Brienne is infuriatingly blind Jaime-wise. She seems to have two boxes in her brain where her Jaime data is stored: one labelled ‘he does this because he’s grateful because he thinks I saved his life’ and the other labelled ‘my housemates are just imagining that.’ Jaime’s intense stares, his attendance at all Brienne’s matches, his horrifically unsubtle appreciation of her legs, and his willy-waving when Tormund is there, have all made it into one of these two boxes. Anything less than Jaime declaring himself passionately and eternally in love will be filed away in one of those boxes. In fact, Brienne is starting up the filing process right now…

“I think he was just very drunk,” she says. “He’d burnt his hand and I was helping him. He loves being looked after.”

Yes, there she goes, frantically trying to cram Jaime’s ‘I love you’ into the gratitude box where it patently won’t fit. Margaery wants to shake her.

“He still misses his mum. Under all the bluster, he just wants to be cared for,” finishes Brienne, her eyes filling in the same way they do when she sees a Battersea Dogs Home advert on telly.

“Do you not want him to love you?”

“I – I want us to keep being friends.”

_Because that’s safer._ Margaery chooses her words carefully. “Look, I know that what happened with those pricks at the academy hurt you-”

Brienne gets to her feet. “You know I won’t talk about this.”

“I know, I know. I’m just saying, that was years ago, and he isn’t them. I didn’t trust him at first; I thought with Tywin Lannister as a dad, how could he not be a shit? I assumed he was just trying to get his leg over, but you say you haven’t…”

“I _haven’t_ ,” Brienne mutters. “With anyone.”

“And he’s still here.”

For a second, Brienne looks wildly round, as though she believes Jaime really is _here_ , hiding behind the island or crammed into the crockery cupboard, eavesdropping.

Margaery continues. “All the frickin’ time actually. We should start charging him a share of the rent. But seriously, he’s decent.”

“You don’t need to convince me he’s decent,” Brienne says, sitting down again. “I know that.”

“I’m not trying to convince you he’s decent. I’m trying to convince you to shag him.”

This statement is enough to send Brienne fleeing for the world of wind speeds and precipitation percentages once more. At last she says, “I couldn’t. Even if he wanted to-”

“He does want to. Trust me.”

“Even if he did, I couldn’t. Not with him looking the way he does.”

“What? What’s wrong with him?!”

“Nothing. That’s the point. While I look like I should be off rescuing Princess Fiona with Donkey. Or chasing Jack down a beanstalk.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Go round there. Even if it’s just to make friends again.” She touches the tattoo on Brienne’s forearm. “This.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry, no Jaime in this chapter. He was meant to be in it, but the chapter got too big so I've had to split it. Next chapter though (which is nearly done, so not far off), we shall feast on him. And not in a flashback way.  
> (You don't know how hard it was to resist putting Dany in that list of people who are doomed because of their own ambition.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: some brief references to prior sexual assaults.

Brienne is not a superstitious person, but she cannot help feeling unnerved by the number of ill omens that she witnesses en route to Jaime’s house to ‘clear the air’ that evening. First there is Karsi, backing her car into her drive and smashing her wing mirror on the gatepost. “Oops,” she calls to Brienne, who is just getting into her own car, and feels a chunk of the seven years’ bad luck attach itself to her back like a baby koala. Then there is the weather. What has been negligible drizzle all day suddenly becomes the weather of the apocalypse as Brienne turns on her engine. The kind of rain that would see Noah rushing to build an ark. Low rumbles which might be thunder, or which might be Cerberus the dog abandoning his post as guardian of the underworld and coming up to devour the living. All the traffic lights turn to red for her, and Brienne sees an accident on Park Lane; four boy racers swaggering in front of the police as though they’ve just won the Grand Prix rather than ploughing their Corsa into a ditch.

When Brienne at last pulls into Jaime’s long gravel drive, she has to park behind his three cars, his motorbike, the dogwalker’s van, and the cleaner’s car. She gets drenched as she sprints to the porch, her progress tracked by a lone magpie sitting in a tree in Jaime’s sprawling garden. The front door is already open, and beyond the porch, in the imposing hall, are Jaime, Bronn and Pia.

Brienne and Ygritte once spent a good five minutes berating Jaime for his ‘capitalist, patriarchal’ use of a minimum wage woman to do his dirty work for him. Jaime had allowed both of them to mount their high horses, and take a jaunt to Self-Righteous Castle regarding poor Pia’s treatment, before announcing that he paid her three times the going rate, had put her and her little girl up rent-free for three months after she’d left her abusive boyfriend, and forked out for her foreign holiday every year. Brienne and Ygritte had conceded that these were all mitigating factors. 

As Brienne steps into the porch this evening, Bronn and Pia are in the middle of a fierce row. From what Brienne can gather, Pia, the best paid cleaner in the UK, is angry that Bronn brought the dogs home and allowed them to frolic through the hall with their filthy paws and wagging muddy tails when she had just finished cleaning. Bronn is saying that it would have got dirty again anyway, and that Pia should take the stick out of her arse; Pia is threatening to thrust her mop up his, and is following Bronn’s argument to its logical conclusion – “Why clean your teeth when they just get dirty again? Why eat when you’ll just get hungry again? Because for a few hours you get the damn benefit! My hall didn’t even stay clean for five minutes!” Jaime, apparently just arrived home from a shift, is looking weary as hell, and trying to mediate. “It doesn’t matter,” he keeps saying, which of course appeases the wounded pride of neither adversary.

“If it doesn’t matter, why pay me to do it?” says Pia, and leaves in high dudgeon, muttering “Men!” to Brienne as she passes her. 

“Drive safely,” Brienne tells her. “The roads are bad.”

Jaime at last notices Brienne, dripping in his porch, and gives her a long, calculating look before dismissing Bronn. The dogwalker, hardly an oil painting himself, smirks as he saunters past Brienne, seemingly conducting a quick visual assessment as to whether he would fuck her or not. She suspects from his focus on her legs that the answer is ‘yes, with a paper bag over her head.’

Jaime politely excuses himself to have a shower; Brienne flees to the kitchen where the three dogs forgo licking themselves clean in favour of the easier option of wiping their dirty bodies all over her. Brienne’s light jeans and white T shirt are soon an unattractive patchy grey. She wouldn’t normally mind, but she has always felt uncomfortable in Jaime’s home, and she feels even more incongruous now. It is a house better-suited to the Jaime Lannister of the tabloids than the Jaime Brienne knows. Old with high, haughty ceilings and stern, wooden panelling. An AGA in the kitchen – a damn AGA for a man who can’t make Macaroni Cheese. Huge spiders run out from under the antique furniture in the autumn, terrifying Pia.

Outside, the rain becomes even heavier, streaming down the windows. A grandfather clocks strikes in the hall. Half past eight. Every minute she waits she gets more tense. _What on earth am I doing here?_ she thinks. _I could be at home watching game film. Or reading. Why did I listen to Margaery? Why did I let a one-time, chance encounter on a canal turn me into this? Sitting here, doing breathing exercises. Feeling like I’m about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel._

Her pacing and fidgeting is putting the dogs on edge, especially Caoimhe the Irish Setter. Caoimhe is a rescue dog with all manner of anxieties and prejudices. She loathes men with black hair, howls like the world is going to end if she sees a person on crutches or in a wheelchair, and has to sleep in Jaime’s bedroom because the screaming of foxes outside upsets her. Brienne’s roving seems to have woken the dog’s latent tendency to submissive urination. Brienne clears up the splatters of wee, and then sits on the floor with Jaime's beautiful copper lady. She pulls out her phone to give her hands something to do, and idiotically, ends up googling Jaime, scrolling through articles and images of him. Jaime, at some glamorous event, gazing adoringly at Cersei who is wearing heels that look like instruments of torture. Jaime emerging from Tywin’s private jet with his brother. A ‘source’ close to Cersei claiming he had cheated on her. Another source, after their breakup six years ago, branding him “callous and abusive.” A photo of the £150,000 Lamborghini he had crashed at high speed seven years ago, putting a little boy and himself in hospital for weeks. The time he had punched a photographer and been fined £5000. On it goes.

There is nothing here Brienne hasn’t already seen, but in her own cosy home, with Sansa baking cookies while Ygritte and Arya openly googled Jaime, and Jaime denied, repented or made light, it hadn’t seemed anything too bad. Now it does. The gulf, in their behaviour, in their experience, too wide. Jaime casually losing £30,000 in a Vegas casino for his 25th birthday; Brienne’s idea of a profligate night out is getting two portions of cheesy chips at £1.20 each.

She is looking at a photo of Jaime kissing Cersei on a beach in Hawaii, his hard-on very evident in his swimming trunks, when she hears his feet on the stairs, and suddenly realises that she cannot do this. She cannot be alone in this house with this man. This man who comes from another world. His response when she texted to ask if she could come by and give him his present tonight: “If you want.”

_What am I doing here? What am I doing here??_ She lurches up off the floor. She runs to the kitchen door, but it is locked. There are two keys hanging over near the Aga and Brienne skids across the tiles, plucks them from their hooks, and returns to the door. She is fiddling, frantically trying to get the second key into the lock when the hall door opens.

“Leaving already?”

Brienne turns slowly. Jaime’s hair is wet, his face unshaven, his chest and feet bare. He is wearing a pair of grey jogging bottoms which, miraculously, are still a uniform grey once his dogs have finished jumping all over him -presumably because they have already wiped all their dirt off on Brienne.

“I – forgot something from my car.” Brienne turns red from the lie. She suspects the lengthening of her nose, Pinocchio-style, could not have given her away more.

“Oh? What was that then?”

“My – er – my –” _Think. Think. Think_. “My phone charger.”

“I’ll plug you into mine,” he says mildly, holding out his hand. Brienne mechanically hands over her phone, and Jaime inserts his charger into it. Brienne is reminded of her childhood book How Babies Are Made: ‘The man inserts his penis into the woman’s vagina…’ _No, no, don’t think about that._

“94 percent,” says Jaime, checking the lock screen. “I can see why it was so urgent for you to retrieve your charger.”

“I do like to have it with me,” says Brienne faintly.

“Clearly.” He eyes her. “You’re quite wet and dirty, aren’t you?”

Brienne’s eyes widen. “It’s lousy weather,” she murmurs.

“Naah, it’s good weather. For the moor fires anyway.” He goes to the fridge, pulls out a dish of something far too edible to have been made by him, and sticks it in the microwave. He does not offer Brienne a drink or food.

“Moor fires?”

“Oh, of course, you’ve been out of the country,” he says carelessly, moving back to stand just in front of her. “Fires all over Greater Manchester and Lancashire moors again, with the hot, dry weather.”

“Oh no.” Brienne has to fight the urge not to back away. She folds her arms protectively about herself.

“We’ve been doing twelve-hour shifts. They brought in firefighters from Cumbria, Humberside and Nottingham to help get it under control.” He gestures to the window. “But this should do it.”

“You’ve been busy with overtime the last week or so then?”

“Yeah.” He looks at her, and Brienne has the idea that he is daring her to say it. To ask if this is the reason they haven’t spoken.

“You’ll be knackered,” she says instead, and moves towards the dogs’ bed. “I’ll go. Let you sleep.” She picks up a rope toy and begins her ritual goodbye tug-of-war game with Faith the Springer.

“I’m not tired,” he says. “Your hair’s got blonder. And you’re tanned. I didn’t know you tanned.”

“Only after I burn.” Brienne touches her peeling nose. “I should go.”

“Why should you?” He is looking fixedly at her now. “You haven’t given me my present yet.”

Brienne is grateful to have something to focus on other than Jaime’s crotch bulge, which keeps drawing her eye. She would stake her right foot on him not having underwear on below those jogging pants.

“Oh, right. Here.” She removes two packages from her bag, then thinks better of the larger one, and tries to shove it back out of sight. Jaime, drawn to what he cannot have, prises it from her hand and unwraps it.

“Oh.” He stares. “It’s… wow?”

“Solidified beans on toast,” Brienne mutters. “My dad left it at the villa last time he was there, weeks ago. Presumably decided he wasn’t hungry after all, and just – left it.” She takes it from him and holds it vertically to demonstrate its rigid state. It had seemed funny. Now it seems idiotic.

Jaime laughs. “I didn’t know that was possible. It’s like modern art. Do you think I could hang it somewhere?”

“Away from the dogs, yeah.” Brienne basks in his smile

His other present is a Cretan knife and the sight of the gleaming blade seems to remind Jaime that he should not be playing nice. “Are you off now then?”

Brienne’s stomach drops, but she replies curtly. “If you want, yes.”

“No. _You_ wanted that.”

“What do you want?”

“We could watch a film,” says Jaime.

“Okay.”

“And you could put some dry clothes on.”

“I’m fine as –”

“You did this when we first met,” he says rudely. “Do you feel virtuous being uncomfortable or something? Or are you scared you’ll catch cooties if you wear my stuff?”

“No,” snaps Brienne. “Fine. I’ll change my clothes, if it’s that damn important to you.”

“Yeah, a lot of things are damn important to me that aren’t to you.”

They go up to Jaime’s room and he picks out black running shorts and a vest for her. Brienne finds the whole thing excruciating. Trailing him up the grand polished staircase, inhaling his hostility as though he were smoking a joint full of it. The way he keeps standing too close to her, as though he is as oblivious to the concept of personal space as his dogs are. Him picking out her clothes like one of those wealthy men in movies who lays out a slinky dress for the penniless sweetheart to wear to some event where she will make cute faux pas with the cutlery and the finger bowl. Brienne wonders how many women have undressed for Jaime in this room. Has Cersei? She remembers the way he was gazing at her in that photo.

She towel-dries her hair and gets changed in Jaime’s dressing room, just off the bedroom. Then she crouches, head in hands, and tries to calm herself down. She has to forget that she is in Little Lord Fauntleroy’s _dressing room,_ and think sensibly. Why is he being like this? _Because he drunkenly said he loved you, and he wants you to realise he didn’t mean it._ Yes, except that _she_ had already acted like he didn’t mean it. She had told him he must be very drunk to say it. She had given him the get-out; there was no need for this unpleasantness. _Then maybe it’s_ _because he actually meant what he said, and you brushed it away like it was nothing._

Brienne has, over the last fortnight, periodically considered that Jaime might have meant what he said that night, but never with any real conviction. It had been Schrodinger’s Declaration of Love, both true and untrue, hovering in quantum limbo. She had got on a plane two days later, sure that when she returned, he wouldn’t even remember saying it, that things would be completely normal. But now, sitting here in Jaime’s dressing room, wearing Jaime’s clothes, fraught from that hardened look in his eyes, she suddenly realises that he _did_ mean it, that it _was_ a big deal for him, and that he isn’t going to allow it to blow over. The knowledge paralyses her.

Sweet baby Jesus. What does this mean? What does he want from her? What does _she_ want? Will they be able to keep being friends – nice, safe friends? Or does he actually think he can date her? Buy her heels she can’t walk in and slinky dresses, and expect her to grow her hair? Will he want her to send him photos of her tits? Or does he want to plunge straight into a serious relationship? Will he expect her to pick his socks off the floor, scrub his skid-stains off the toilet, and turn a blind eye while he shags other women as Selwyn had with Charlotte? How would Jaime the boyfriend differ from Jaime the friend? How would Brienne the girlfriend differ from Brienne the friend?

Suddenly that bulge beneath Jaime’s jogging pants seems far from hypothetical. The idea of that being inside her… Oh God, oh God, this is terrifying. She’s imagined sex with him before, obviously, but that was imaginary, and Brienne always gave her imaginary self an extensive makeover, and she made imaginary Jaime write poetry for her and say nice things like, “It doesn’t matter that you’ve never done it before. I’m honoured I’m your first,” instead of the sarcastic kind of things he actually says.

Something worse occurs to her then. Sansa had gone out with a bloke called Ramsay for about a month. The first time they’d had sex, he’d choked her. Put his hands around her damn throat and squeezed. Afterwards he told her that most men do it and most women like it. Sansa, not wanting to seem dull and ‘sex-negative,’ had endured a wide range of bizarre sex acts which left her, at best, bored, and at worst, injured and humiliated. Arya, meanwhile, had had a bloke spend several minutes trying to persuade her to do anal. When she’d refused, he’d tried to do it anyway. He’d regretted that. One could only hope, for the sake of the future women he encountered, that he would remember what a small female can do to a man when his balls are out. Even Ygritte, a year ago, had had one man ejaculate across her face; he’d seized her chin so she could not pull away. When she’d slapped him, he’d said, “I thought girls liked it.” Ygritte had called him a twat, and spent the next day doing ‘research’ on various porn sites. “No wonder most are so shit in bed,” she’d said as her housemates tried not to listen to the theatrical moans and wails. “They think this is real. That we’re all desperate for ten minutes noshin’ on their smelly old knobs, and then that they can ram us with it for another ten, and maybe slap us around and call us dirty whores, and that’ll bring us to a screamin’ orgasm. It’s like the clitoris doesn’t exist.” Ygritte had actually sounded upset.

Margaery had said, “Thank God I’m a lesbian,” and Brienne had thought, “Thank God I don’t have sex.” But what if she does, with Jaime? And what if he spunks across her face, tries to choke her, or tries for the backdoor when she’s saying she doesn’t want that? She doesn’t think she would ever get over that. It would break her heart.

And he is so much more experienced than her. He and Cersei got together at fifteen or something. They lived together for years, holidayed together, drove to work together. Brienne has kissed and made out with one man. Well, a man-boy really. She has been forcibly kissed by another. She had a boyfriend when she was five, but he dumped her for Jade Adams after three days. In fact, she has probably had more of a long-term sexual relationship with Walder Frey than with anyone else. He has, after all, grabbed her breasts three or four times over the course of two years.

Brienne suddenly knows that what she needs is to get home. She needs time – say, a year or two – to take all this in and get past the fear to figure out what she wants. And she can’t get past the fear while Jaime is here, topless and predatory. She needs for her housemates to list all the things that prove he likes her, and this time she will actually listen. Because Brienne will never entirely trust her own instincts regarding men. She’s got it wrong before. Believed her looks could be irrelevant in the face of her kindness and skill with a football. She hadn’t realised then that if you were a woman, you could be all manner of talented and kind, but if you weren’t pretty as well, too many people would never see past that.

There is a knock on the dressing room door, but Jaime does not barge in. Apparently he has learnt his lesson regarding barging in on Brienne. “What on earth are you doing in there?”

“Nothing. Nearly done.” Brienne knows her voice is too high to sound normal.

_You’ve just got to get through the film_ , she tells herself. _We’ll go downstairs, sit on his sofa, watch the screen for a couple of hours, and then I can go home. It’s going to be fine. Just don’t think of anything beyond getting through this._

She steps out into the bedroom, and then pulls up short. It seems that while she was having a nervous breakdown in the dressing room, Jaime was channelling Machiavelli. The dish that he earlier placed in the microwave now sits on his bedside table, a fork sticking out of it. Next to it are two cups of tea and a bag of toffee popcorn. The three dogs have also found their way up from the kitchen, and they run to welcome Brienne with guileless enthusiasm, unaware that they are pawns in this game of entrapment. Meanwhile, looking supremely nonchalant, his bedroom telly on, Jaime is lying on the bed, flicking through Sky movies. He pats the space beside him without even looking at Brienne, as if this is normal. As if they always watch stuff in bed together.

And the thing is, they have watched stuff on Brienne’s bed. The tennis for example. But that was with four other women about the house, and Jaime had been wearing a top and socks and trousers that didn’t show the outline of his cock. Brienne had been wearing her own clothes. Jaime hadn’t said ‘God, I love you’ two weeks earlier, and there hadn’t been this awful, embarrassing tension between them. But of course, Brienne will not say any of this, and Jaime knows it.

The horrible thing about erythrophobia – fear of blushing – is that it often causes the very thing one is phobic of. People with arachnophobia, musophobia and astropophobia do not bring about, respectively, a plague of spiders, mice or thunderstorms merely by reflecting on their fears. But Brienne regularly causes her own blushes simply by thinking about how bad it would be to blush right now.

The sight of Jaime waiting topless for her on the bed is the last straw. _Don’t react. Don’t blush._ But it is as though all Brienne’s other blushes have been mere dress rehearsals leading up to this one. It isn’t as red or as expansive as many of her blushes have been, but, combined with her stricken face, it gives away far too much of what she has just been thinking. Jaime takes one look at her face and his eyes suddenly become mortifyingly tender. In one swift motion, he is off the bed and moving inexorably towards her.

“No. Don’t –” She takes a couple of stuttering steps backwards. He catches up to her, puts his arms round her and buries his face into her hair.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he says, holding her. “We’ve got to talk about it.”

“No,” says Brienne. “No, I’m no good at talking about stuff.”

“You are. You’re wonderful.” He rubs his nose gently against her cheek.

“No, you’re not listening. I can’t talk about this. Not right now. I need time –”

“Well, let me lead then. You can just give one or two-word answers.” He holds her face in his hands and looks at her in a way that makes her believe that the human body is 60% water in a way she never has before. She doesn’t know how she is still standing. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know. Everyone knows what they want.”

“Do they?” says Brienne, with mounting distress. “Well. I want to go home. I want to sleep well -which I won’t now, because of _you_. I want to get up tomorrow and sled train at the park. That’s what I want.”

Jaime moves closer, his mouth an inch or so from hers.

“It wasn’t fair to trick me up here like this, Jaime.”

“I know,” he whispers, thumb grazing her lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He doesn’t sound sorry. He sounds breathless and het up.

“What do _you_ want?” she says, because it’s the first thing she can think of to stop his lips getting any closer to hers.

“You,” he says. “Whatever way I can have you. But I can’t just be friends anymore.”

Brienne’s eyes flicker involuntarily to the bed, and her panic must show.

“Yes, that,” he murmurs. “But only when you’re ready. I’ll wait as long as you want.”

“Then why try and trap me up here with all this?” Brienne gestures to the dogs, the telly, the cups of tea. She takes another step back, and Jaime’s face falls.

“I was a dick. I was hurt,” he says. “I should have remembered that this happened to you before, only–” He stops, eyes widening.

“What?” Brienne’s heart starts to beat very fast. “What did you just say?”

Jaime swallows. “I should have thought… that… that it wasn’t a polite thing to do.”

“That isn’t what you said,” says Brienne, her voice stronger than it has been all night. “What were you going to say?”

Jaime swallows. He tries to lay his hand on Brienne’s cheek again, but she jerks away.

“You tell me what you were going to say or I’m leaving now.”

“No. You’re not leaving like this.”

Brienne waits, eyes dry, mouth set. Outside, the rain is still hammering down.

“I know what happened between you and those twats,” he says at last. “The ones at Man City.”

“How do you know?” Brienne is amazed by how cold, how strong her voice is. As though it has been working out and taking illegal steroids for months; it’s probably about to have a heart attack, but on the surface it seems like one tough motherfucker.

“Sansa,” he admits. “Don’t be angry with her. It was my fault. We’d all been drinking, you went to the loo, I asked her about whether there’d been anyone serious for you.”

“What did she say?”

Jaime tries to get away with a few vague hints, but Brienne raps it out again. “What did she say?”

“That a load of them were hanging round you. That one, Hyle, seemed better than the others, and after a few weeks, you agreed to go out with him. That he walked you home, tricked you into letting him up to your room by pretending to want to see your trophies, then started… making out with you. That it got heavy. That he recorded the audio on his phone, shared it round his mates, and tried to use it as proof he’d won the bet, even though you hadn’t actually – had full sex with him.”

“How long have you known?”

“Four months… Maybe five.”

Brienne goes back into the dressing room, picks up her trainers, jeans, and T-shirt, and walks quickly to the bedroom door. Jaime immediately bounds forward. “You said you wouldn’t leave if I was honest with you.”

“Four or five months you’ve known,” Brienne spits at him. “You used my drunk friend to spy on me. Behind my back. I only know now because you let it slip! You think you’ve been honest?”

“She said you refuse to ever talk about it,” says Jaime, losing patience. “That’s why I never mentioned knowing. And yes, God forbid that I might use your friends to get closer to you while you constantly used them as a buffer against me!”

“I’ll send your vest and shorts back when I’ve washed them,” says Brienne, fingers trembling with rage.

Jaime ignores this. “You always made us sit downstairs with them. If we ever did watch anything on our own, you’d constantly be disappearing to see them, or trying to invite one of them to come and be with us, like some fucking chaperone. And you have the gall to say I’m dishonest!”

Brienne opens the door, and the three dogs slink out; they are not used to their dad sounding like this. Stuffing her feet into her trainers, Brienne says, “Of course. _I’m_ the dishonest one because I didn’t realise how you fucking felt!”

“You did realise!” he yells, head in hands. “I tried to go gently with you but I’ve hardly been subtle about how I feel, Brienne. Your friends could all see it! If you chose not to, that’s because you lied to yourself. And me. I tell you I love you, and you call me a drunken idiot! Then you fuck off to Crete for nearly two weeks. You send two messages that completely ignored what I said to you. You were too cowardly to even ask me what was up because you knew what I’d say.”

“Did you leave my phone in the kitchen?” Brienne demands.

“Yeah. It really needed charging, remember? Yet more of your _honesty_!”

He blocks half the doorway so that Brienne has to knock against his bare arm as she leaves. Under the humiliation and anger, something inside her ignites at the contact. She could slam him against the wall and kiss him – she suspects Jaime is the type of man who would quickly forget his rage when kissed – but he knows about Hyle and the bet, and that is enough to keep Brienne moving towards the stairs, her stomach roiling. Jaime is after her at once, apparently determined to pour petrol on this inferno.

“After that time I walked in on you with your vibrator –”

“Don’t you _dare_ talk about that!”

“– you completely cut me off. Only reason I got to see you before you went away is because Ygritte invited me round. You couldn’t even make our friendship outweigh your petty embarrassment, could you?”

That stings. “My privacy means a hell of a lot to me,” Brienne says, “and you invaded it. I wouldn’t expect Jaime Spoilt Brat Lannister to understand that. Prancing out of private jets, throwing your money about, stopping just short of fucking your supermodel girlfriend on a beach, all while the paparazzi are watching.”

“Are you jealous!? Of Cersei?”

Brienne ignores this, and takes the stairs three at a time. She is furious with herself for saying so much. She resolves not to utter another word while she is so patently not in control of her emotions.

“You are,” he says. “That’s what gets me. If you just didn’t want me, I wouldn’t blame you. But you do, and we both know it. And I know when I’m being lied to; I spent 15 years with a woman who did little else. I will not put up with that again.”

They are in the kitchen now, Brienne unplugging her phone, dropping it into her bag, and stooping to kiss the dogs on their furry foreheads. She should not have engaged. She’d told him she needed time, that she couldn’t talk now. She shouldn’t have let him railroad her into it.

“And it’s interesting,” adds Jaime furiously, “that you’re allowed to google me and believe people that make a living from painting me in the worst possible light, while I’ve only ever tried to get insight on you from people who absolutely adore you.”

“I’m going,” she mutters.

“Fine,” he says. Then, with the air of someone committed to getting absolutely everything off his chest while he still can, “Your legs look so fucking hot in those shorts.”

Pink-faced, Brienne runs through the rain to her car. Her head is pounding, a premenstrual migraine exacerbated by the last half hour, and by the time she gets home, the tears are in full flow.


	7. Chapter 7

Tywin Lannister holds his 70th birthday party at his 15 acre country estate in Cheshire, and anyone who is anyone – assuming ‘anyone’ means being a rich, pompous prick – is there. Jaime and Brienne meet at the small country railway station, and together walk the one mile along rural lanes to the house. They have not seen each other since that night at Jaime’s house eight days earlier. A few tentative messages have been exchanged (“How are you?” “Yeah, ok, busy training. How are you?” “Yeah, surviving.”) and Jaime knows that he’d probably have pushed harder if he hadn’t been so desperate for Brienne not to back out of being his plus 1 on this journey into the fiery furnaces of Hell also known as Tywin’s party. Though given Brienne agreed to attend _before_ Jaime walked in on her touching herself, _before_ he told her he loved her, and _before_ he spent a night snarling at her at his house, and she is _still_ here, he does wonder what other mortifications he would have had to wreak on her to make her back out on the promise.

They can barely look at one another during their greeting, and their conversation is horribly stilted all the way to the house. Jaime’s nerves are frayed. It does not come naturally to him to act warily, to reign himself in. There are numerous things he is desperate to say, but all seem to be off limits according to the deeply precarious peace treaty that Brienne has telepathically brokered with him to get through this event.

Jaime isn’t sure whether Tyrion will be grateful or resentful that Brienne is here tonight. Usually it is Shae, with her French accent, hilariously uncivil remarks, and candid discussion of her time in the porn industry, who commands the curious, disapproving glances of their fellow party-goers. Tyrion is ambivalent about this, part of him wanting to court – and indeed marry – controversy, part of him desiring nothing more than to fit in. But Brienne, in her short black skater dress, battered Converse, and with her tomboy hair, visible tattoo, and unladylike career, will certainly draw some attention away from Shae tonight. Alongside the diamonds, trailing Versace dresses and Christian Louboutin shoes, Brienne will be a fish out of water. A defiant and very taciturn fish.

She looks fit as fuck, but as that is one of the things Jaime can’t say, he settles for, “I like your dress.” He is just starting to think of the etiquette regarding clothing and ‘decency’ – the way the really sexy parts, like breasts and bottoms and privates have to be hidden, so given how obscenely sexy Brienne’s legs are, should they be hidden away too? -when Brienne retorts with –

“I look stupid. Margaery and Sansa wouldn’t let me wear trousers.” She lifts up a sparkly black bag on a chain and says crossly, “I don’t even have pockets.”

Silently noting that Sansa at least has been forgiven for her part in the espionage on Brienne’s past, Jaime wonders aloud why women’s clothes never have pockets.

“So they can make us spend money on bags,” says Brienne. “And so we don’t ruin our silhouettes with clunky purses and phones. Form over function. It stinks.”

This is as loquacious as she gets, and Jaime mentally notes that apparently the way to make Brienne speak tonight will be to simply get her angrier than she is embarrassed. He takes them into the grounds through a rickety side gate -one Cersei used to slip through to meet him when they were teenagers – and they wander along a wooded path, and then past geometric lawns, several politely babbling fountains and some weed-free patios, right up to the house itself.

Cersei will be here tonight. Jaime stopped wanting her long ago but the sight of her will never not give him pain. Fifteen years, on and off. Most of his teens. All of his twenties. All the years he should have been learning how to be a man. How to have a romantic relationship that wasn’t festering and full of rot. It isn’t just that he feels he missed out on some initiation step he should have taken ages ago. It is that he still feels damaged. Warped. He learnt all the wrong lessons, and he doesn’t know if he can unlearn them now and go onto the right ones. He suspects that Brienne senses this taint about him, and that is why she holds him off despite being attracted to him. Sensible girl.

A minibus taxi pulls up beside them, spitting gravel, and from the passenger seat springs Tyrion with great alacrity. He throws his arms about Jaime, who crouches with almost embarrassing haste to feel the embrace of the one being in the world who loves him unconditionally and doesn’t have four legs and a penchant for chewing up sticks or licking peanut butter out of a Kong. Tyrion withdraws before Jaime is at all ready, nods at Brienne, then returns to the minibus where a furious battle with the back door commences, while the taxi driver shouts helpful instructions, like, “No, you need to lift it. No, the handle _and_ the door! Lift them, then pull it towards you. Now slide it backwards. No, you have to slide it suddenly. Yank it! Keep the handle up and towards you!”

“For fuck’s sake,” mutters Tyrion, as Jaime steps in to assist him. “I’m trying to open a fucking door, not pilot a rocket into space.”

When the obstinate door is at last open, Shae climbs regally out, followed, bizarrely, by an army of giggling ten-year-old girls. There are eight of them and then, bringing up the rear, stern-faced Laia, who of course is actually a middle-aged woman trapped in the body of a small girl.

“What on earth…?” asks Jaime , looking warily at the girls who carry an assortment of paraphernalia with them – bags of Haribo, cuddly unicorns, jelly shoes and a very large stuffed Toothless the Dragon.

“A sleepover,” says Shae, breezily in her heavy accent. “Silly us, we forget that tonight is your father’s party. Laia would have been distraught if we uninvite them, so here we all are!”

Laia gives her mother a censorious look before turning to her uncle. “They didn’t forget. Tyrion thought we’d be allowed to leave earlier this way,” she explains wearily. To be sure, her parents have already used up the majority of conventional excuses for avoiding various Lannister events – tummy bugs, flu, car accidents, a sat nav that allegedly sent them down to Birmingham instead of up to Carlisle without either of them noticing.

“What stories you make up, Laia!” says Tyrion, mouth twitching. “Granddad Lannister adores children. That’s why your Uncle Jaime and I were both packed off to boarding school. Now why would a gaggle of little girls running amok amongst his precious possessions make him wish for our early departure?”

Laia ignores him. “All week, I’ve put up with this nonsense,” she tells Jaime severely. “How they don’t want to come. How can they worm out of it this time. I tell them life is full of unpleasant things and you just have to get on with it, but they don’t listen.” She turns to Brienne. “It’s nice to meet you again. That’s a very pretty dress.” Then she marches off after the other girls, her shoulders weighed down with the responsibility of preventing them – and her parents – from doing anything too egregious.

Shae steps forward, her pink dress billowing as though she has her own weather system: gale-force winds. She kisses Jaime before embracing Brienne in a sisterly way that makes Jaime tense up.

“This is my friend, Brienne,” he says quickly, as Shae observes that it is lovely to meet Brienne _at last_.

“Friend, eh?” murmurs Tyrion as he and Jaime follow Brienne and Shae up the steps to the entrance hall, Jaime’s conscience swiftly losing in the battle over whether to enjoy the view of Brienne’s arse or not. “So I had to persuade Michael Keane from Eye that it was in his interests to publish a load of interviews with female footballers, _and_ I had to spend weeks negotiating TV rights for the WSL, and you haven’t even managed to negotiate your cock into her yet?”

“Will you keep your fucking voice down?” mutters Jaime as a man who looks suspiciously like Jacob Rees-Mogg steps us beside them and throws them an unpleasant look.

But Tyrion has already moved on to his own concerns. “Oh, dear God, there’s an announcer again…” He rushes dementedly after his wife, and arrives at her side just as she reaches the announcer who stands in the main archway into the great hall. Jaime is just in time to hear Tyrion pleading with the man to announce him and Shae as ‘Mrs Shae Lannister and Mr Tyrion Lannister.’

The man is so shocked his moustache quivers. “Sir, that isn’t the correct etiquette. You are Mr and Mrs Tyrion Lannister.”

Shae looks at the man as though he is some interesting new specimen in the zoo.

“Forget your Debrett’s training,” says Tyrion. “My wife isn’t happy to lose her entire name. Surely etiquette should make guests feel comfortable? At the very least, they shouldn’t lead to my castration, or yours.”

“Sir, it wouldn’t be right.”

“Well, to save your conscience, I announce us then,” says Shae. She draws herself up, bellows out the preferred nomenclature to the entire hall and then storms in, the rest of the guests watching her with contemptuous glee. Jaime can sense Brienne mentally adding ‘being treated as chattel at events’ to her list of reasons not to get romantically involved with him, a Lannister. He really shouldn’t have brought her here. He’d been selfish, wanting her strength and her calm, but she is so uncomfortable that he feels even worse.

Just how much he shouldn’t have brought her here becomes apparent within the first twenty minutes. Brienne might not have quite the same fire power as Shae, but she is new, looks like she might chain herself to a tree or lie down on a runway at Heathrow, and she is young enough for there to be a hint of Lolita-esque scandal in Jaime bringing her along. She is quickly swamped by Jaime’s relations and the friends of his parents, who all demand to be introduced. Uncle Bryan -who looks like the unholy offspring born of a union between a giant ham and a walrus – is first up, demanding to know what Brienne does for a living.

“I’m a footballer,” she says.

“But what’s your proper job?” Uncle Bryan barks, clearly convinced that football is merely Brienne’s hobby. Something she does on Saturdays alongside other women with foolishly liberal husbands who allow such rubbish.

“That _is_ my proper job,” says Brienne, two spots of colour appearing high in her cheeks. “I play for Man United full-time. I’ve played for the England Under 17s, the Under 20s, the Under 23s, and I’m hoping to be called up for the senior squad next month and play in the friendlies in Belgium and Norway.”

“My goodness,” says Bryan, smirking slightly. “So we’re in the presence of a celebrity.” It is exactly the type of comment you’d expect from a man who believes feminism went too far when it got marital rape outlawed in 1991. Jaime has a distinct childhood memory of his uncle at some family event, citing Eve (she of the apple), Pandora (she of the box) and Lilith (the child-stealing demon) as proof that women were the cause of all suffering in the world, while ignoring the very non-mythological figures like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot et depressing cetera. He is, frankly, a cunt. No. Cunts are nice.

Brienne pulls out her phone and pointedly ignores Bryan, which is probably the best approach given he is too hammy to be flung back into the Arctic Ocean with the other walruses, and too walrussy to be stuffed into an oven and roasted for Sunday lunch. 

Then Uncle Edward opens his big mouth too. “I suppose she’ll have to give it up when she has children,” he says, addressing Jaime, whom he presumably believes is the true proprietor of Brienne’s womb and ovaries.

“Perhaps you should ask her. She’s standing right here,” says Jaime through gritted teeth.

Edward, who has no sisters, no daughters, who was formed at an all-boys boarding school, who chillaxes at an all-male golf club, and who works in an all-male office (apart from Barbara the PA) looks thoroughly confused at the idea of communicating with a woman who isn’t paid to bring him tea. He appears to consider it for a moment, then shakes his head, and firmly shuts his mouth.

Jaime has to put up with a few fond chuckles about his becoming a firefighter before it is Brienne’s turn again, when Melara and her boyfriend Rupert approach. Melara appears to have come as a mermaid, in a strange shimmering green contraption that flares about her ankles and reveals most of her breasts. Jaime cannot see those breasts without wanting to laugh – he once discovered one of Tyrion’s teenage poems which centred on these appendages -something about drizzling his cream across her sweet juicy peaches. Jaime had ample opportunity to drizzle his cream across her – and into her – but he had never partaken. She was Cersei’s frenemy, and besides, she bored him. Her siren song had never had power over him, so she now turns the full force of her wiles to showing him just what an inferior creature he has brought to this event.

“What wonderfully sensible shoes,” she observes, looking at Brienne’s Converse. “It must be nice to be so tall and not have to bother with heels. Rupert will have to carry me to the car later on my feet will be so sore, but I suppose Jaime would struggle to do that with you.”

“I wouldn’t bother with heels no matter how small I was,” says Brienne curtly, at the same time as Jaime says, “I could easily carry her if she needed me to.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t feel ready for a night out without my heels,” laughs Melara, looking Brienne up and down. “Same with a decent dress, makeup and blow dry. We’re all different, I suppose.”

“I don’t want to struggle to walk, be in pain and get bunions just because a bunch of men decided that women look better when they’re tottering about like newborn fawns,” snaps Brienne, and for some reason she is glaring at Jaime now, as though he invented heels. He couldn’t give a damn, she could have worn her squirrel slippers tonight for all he cares.

“I don’t do it for men,” says Melara. “I do it for me. It makes me feel good.”

“It’s funny that what makes women _feel good_ is usually painful, time-consuming and expensive, and so often ties in with what men enjoy looking at,” says Brienne. “Marketing wouldn’t be a multi-billion pound industry if people were immune to its messages.”

“That tattoo must have been painful and expensive,” Rupert points out, unaware his girlfriend is making a play for another man before his eyes.

“I’m not scared of pain,” says Brienne. “As long as it’s for the right reasons. Excuse me.” And she stalks off.

Melara laughs. “Going to burn her bra, I suppose. She’s very intense, isn’t she? Not the type I thought you’d go for, Jaime.”

“Fuck off, Melara,” Jaime says. It isn’t his smartest comeback, but there lies its power; he didn’t even care enough to give it thought.

He weaves through the other guests and eventually finds Brienne and Shae taking refuge by a window. Shae seems to be looking out at Laia and her friends who have taken off their shoes and socks and are dancing like nymphs in one of the fountains. Brienne is caressing a wooden antique globe, and though he cannot see her face, Jaime can tell she is seeing her future in it; the sphere representing the football, the countries showing her the places she has and will play.

“…with these people,” Brienne is saying bitterly to Shae. “How do you bear it?”

“I love my idiot husband and he need me to protect him,” replies Shae, patting Brienne’s arm sympathetically. “They’re vultures. They don’t like Tyrion. Jaime shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s too much of a – a baptism of fire?”

“I’m only here because I promised him I’d come,” says Brienne shortly. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

Jaime flinches. Wow. That hurt. That chasm between Shae’s Mamma Bear love for Tyrion and Brienne’s resentment at him for forcing her here. For some seconds all he can do is stand there, trying to recover from the sting of it. The two women still have their backs to him, and Jaime is just about to retreat back into the other guests, but suddenly Tyrion is here, carrying three glasses of champagne, and greeting Jaime loudly. Instantly the women turn, and escape is no longer an option.

“Why are the girls out there?” Tyrion grumbles. “They’re meant to be here, smashing up antiques and scuffing the carpets. It’s why I gave them all those sweets.”

“Because our daughter has outsmarted us,” says Shae. “And because it’s nicer out there.”

And with that she downs her glass, and announces to Tyrion that she and Brienne are going outside. That as mere women, their place must be with the children rather than in here with the important folk.

Tyrion starts to argue, Jaime glowers at the floor, and Brienne and Shae depart, shooting each other conspiratorial grins. Two minutes later, the two brothers see the two women join the girls at the fountain. Usually the fun factor of a children’s game drops exponentially when adults arrive, but with Shae and Brienne, the hilarity only increases. Both women discard their shoes, Shae ties her dress up round her thighs, and a game of Tig ensues with everyone getting very wet.

“I suppose we should go and wish our father a prosperous birthday,” says Tyrion, without enthusiasm. The idea of wishing Tywin a _happy_ anything is absurd. Happiness is for children and imbeciles. And even children should have grown out of it by the age of eleven.

“You can. I’m going upstairs.”

Jaime and Tyrion’s mother’s room is set on the west side of the house, so that on a bright evening like this it fills with sunlight. There is her piano, her bookshelves and the bed that she would sometimes escape to when Tywin’s snoring became too much or when she was in one of her phases of insomnia.

“I miss her,” says Tyrion.

“Me too.” Jaime runs a tender hand along the bedspread. “I wish he’d died instead.”

Tyrion snorts. “He _can’t_ die. He might malfunction – run out of batteries, or blow his fuse. Burst into flames from overuse.”

“Tyrion? What do you think she’d make of us now?”

“Make of us?”

“Of how we turned out. Do you think she’d be proud of us or disappointed?”

Tyrion considers for a long time. “I think she’d be glad that we love one another,” is all he says.

“Is that really the only thing she’d like about us?”

“No, she loved our father. We’re definitely more loveable than he is. Jaime, what’s made you so unhappy?”

Jaime shrugs.

Tyrion wanders to the window. “Your girl’s teaching my daughter to climb trees,” he says.

*

Rules of etiquette usually require couples to be seated apart from one another in order to oblige them to talk to new people. Brienne and Shae, however, have been seated with Jaime and Tyrion – as though the four of them must be contained, like some malignant disease. Shae and Tyrion are delighted by this, though Jaime and Brienne get little comfort from the arrangement.

Jaime is more hurt than he can say. He wants her, desperately, and his instinct, when faced with an aloof woman whom he is in love with, is to revert to his old demonstrative behaviours. With Cersei, he usually just had to fuck her back into a good temper. Cuddle her even as she slapped his face. Tell her he loved her as she swore he was pathetic. A few times, when she had told him to leave her alone, he had made the mistake of obeying. Giving Cersei time alone didn’t mean giving her time to calm down. It meant giving her time to stew. To dwell on his inadequacies, on how little he must love her, on how much she had been wronged. He had soon learnt not to leave her be.

But Brienne isn’t like that. She had asked for time a week ago, and he hadn’t given it to her. He had pressed, and she had rushed out like a tornado, leaving Jaime in pieces. She won’t let Jaime dote on her, and he doesn’t know how else to put things right. And he is hurt. And jealous. Jealous that Tyrion has a wife who wants to be here with him, while Brienne is clearly hating every moment.

His father is across the room; he hasn’t so much as looked their way, though he would be furious if they had not turned up. Jaime’s mother is dead, and he will never see her again. Never get to be loved in such an utterly pure way again. Cersei is sitting a few tables away, reminding him of all the years he wasted. And Jaime is so, so sick of everything. He wants for someone to hold him very tightly. But Brienne isn’t doing that. So he returns to the only game he knows. The game Cersei compelled him to play again and again. And he takes the role he was never allowed. The role he never wanted. He sulks. As he did while Brienne was in Crete, but it is much easier when she is here. She tries to catch his eye, and he stares at his dinner. He pours her wine but ignores her thanks. He addresses all his remarks to Shae and Tyrion and a couple of the other diners. When he sees through his peripheral that Brienne is looking around for a waiter to bring her a clean fork, he does not hand her his and take on the job of finding a replacement himself, but leaves her to it. When Brienne starts to look upset, he pretends not to notice. He does not make eye contact with her once for the whole meal.

As soon as the pudding is over, she rises from her chair and leaves the dining room. He assumes she has gone to the loo, but when she does not come back, he starts to worry. If he were truly in Cersei’s role, he would simply wait, but cold disinterest doesn’t come naturally to Jaime. He begins to search for her, but the place is so huge she really could be anywhere. He can’t quite swallow his pride enough to ring her, planning instead to simply find her _by accident_ , but he does ask a few of the staff if they have seen a tall, blonde woman anywhere in the last twenty minutes. Eventually, one young waiter tells Jaime that he directed a tall woman with short, fair hair to the garage. “She wanted ice quickly and that was the nearest place,” he says.

“Why did she want ice?” demands Jaime.

The boy shrugs. Jaime scowls, and heads along a passage and down the few steps to the garage where the spare freezer is kept, along with Tywin’s cars. The large door that opens onto the grounds is shut, so the only light comes from the tepid electric light on the ceiling. Jaime enters to find Brienne sitting on the concrete floor in her ridiculously short dress, her back to him. She has removed her left trainer and is pressing a tea towel full of ice to her ankle. Some of Jaime’s bad temper leaves him at the sight of her there.

“Are you all right?”

She doesn’t look round, doesn’t speak, just nods and continues to hold the improvised ice pack to her skin. She clearly doesn’t want him there, and for a second Jaime considers leaving her. Going back up the stairs and letting her tend to herself. The next second though, he is kneeling before her, trying to see if her ankle is swollen.

“Did you twist it?”

Again, she nods, her face directed down now.

“Can I see?”

She allows him to ease the ice away from her ankle and Jaime realises he doesn’t know what the hell he is looking for. It isn't bleeding or bruised. It doesn't have bones protruding from it. It isn't rotting or oozing puss. It all looks normal enough but he doesn’t know if ankles swell immediately after injury or if they swell at all. Is there some secret thing that first aiders and medics look for? Brienne will have more idea than he does. _Even if she doesn’t bloody well understand anything else_ , he thinks heatedly.

“Can you stand?” he says, and it comes out far more harshly than he had intended it to. More kindly, he adds, “When did you do it?”

“About fifteen minutes ago,” she says softly. “It’s not bad.”

“You should have rung me,” he mutters.

“Why? I didn’t need help. Just to put ice on it for twenty minutes.”

“I didn’t know where you were. And I could have kept you company down here.”

“Ha.” Her laugh is brittle, sarcastic.

Jaime knows he should let it go. He should remember that she is in pain, that they have both drunk too much, that he has been a dick to her for the last couple of hours, that she only came to this sodding party because he asked her to. He should keep his trap shut, and find a number for a taxi for her. But he doesn’t.

“What does that mean?” he says quietly.

“You think I wanted your company? So you could sit there and ignore me? Wow, I wonder why I didn’t call you.”

“You’ve barely looked or spoken to me all night either. You ran off with Shae the first chance you got.”

She looks about to snap something back, then seems to think better of it and clamps her lips shut. Jaime hates it when she does that. So careful about what she reveals, as though he might use it against her.

“I wish I hadn’t met you,” he bursts out. “If you’d just done your normal running route that night, it would have been so much easier than this. I hate that I’m being like this. I hate feeling like this.”

Brienne’s face falls. “Why would you say something like that?”

“It’s true. I don’t know how to make any of this right.” There are tears pricking at his eyes, which is awful, and he tries to blink them quickly away.

Brienne must notice because her eyes widen and she discards the ice pack. With one warm hand and one cold, she leans in to cup Jaime’s face, and he leans forward to let her, but somehow his lips end up on hers and they are kissing. It is tentative and clumsy at first, but gradually her mouth opens for his, and he advances. Edges his tongue into her mouth.

He thinks he might cry with relief at being allowed to touch her. Her hair, the stubble on one side, the short waves on the other. Then her neck. Then her collarbone, strangely fragile below his fingers. Her hips. Brienne is still gripping his face, kissing him hard. It makes a weird sort of sense. Physically, Brienne is dauntless. She might stammer and weigh every word, but her body moves like she has never known fear. She goes for the ball when it means getting hurt. She takes on defenders when others would pass. She plays through pain. She didn’t hesitate to rush in when she saw Jaime being mugged. Her tattoo is Greek for “How the hell did she…?” – the first words Brienne heard after she pulled her brother from the sea off Rethimno when she was 14 and he 17, in a rescue attempt that apparently should have seen her drowned too rather than both siblings safe.

That she is now tugging his shirt from the waistband of his trousers should not be a complete shock. But it is. Her making skin-to-skin contact with his back has him gasping into her mouth. And by crossing the boundary of touching what should be clothed, she has just rendered her own body far more accessible. Jaime’s right hand shifts down to rest on her thigh, because, quite frankly, he has been wanting to get his hands on her thighs from approximately twelve minutes after meeting her, when she handed him back his overcoat in the light of the police cars. When she makes no protest, he slides higher. Then a little higher, until he feels the hem of her dress. The dress that has been driving him crazy all night.

Slowly, his hand edges under the fabric. Her breathing is becoming shallower and he releases her mouth to focus on her neck, her nose, her ear. His hand shifts up the warm, soft skin until at last his fingers brush the edge of her underwear. Jesus Christ. Is this actually fucking happening? He’s dreamt of this enough times, has spent entire days in a fog of sexual frustration because of what Dream-Jaime and Dream-Brienne have done hours earlier.

Dream-Jaime and Dream-Brienne are pros. They have a thoroughly expanded repertoire -missionary, her on top with her breasts in his hands, doggy-style, up against his kitchen counter, over his pool table. Sometimes Brienne is wearing her football kit, and he lets her keep it on and just gets her shorts down. Sometimes she’s in Lycra, and he gets to peel it all off. Often he uses the vibrator he caught her with to get her off while they fuck. In dreams, it doesn’t even require a plug socket. Presumably it derives its power from the sun or from their intense sexual energy, and they have thus far used it in a forest and on a beach. Dream-Brienne also sits on his face with heartwarming regularity, her wetness dripping down onto his lips. She has knelt to suck his cock a fair few times too. They say they love each other constantly.

But Real-Jaime is struggling. His fingers trace the lace at the juncture of her knickers, not quite daring to move underneath. He must have been doing it for too long, because she suddenly pulls away from his kisses and demands, “What are you doing?” It is desperation rather than a prohibition, a ‘get on with it’ rather than a ‘stop that!’

Okay. Apparently the way to get Brienne to speak candidly is not just to get her angrier than she is embarrassed, but also more aroused than she is embarrassed. Worth knowing. He slips his fingers under the material and begins to explore her. She is wet, which is too much for Jaime. All caution flies out of the window. He puts his other hand up her dress, and tugs her knickers down to her knees.

“What – the door!” she whispers furiously. “The door’s still open.”

He leans forward, and slams it shut.

“What if someone comes in?”

“They won’t,” says Jaime, roughly pushing her dress up around her waist. _He will kill anyone who dares to interrupt this._ He pulls her legs apart. Catches her hand when she makes a half-hearted attempt at cover. Oh, Jesus Christ. He could admire this view for hours. That time he’d walked in on her – it hadn’t given him any idea really; her vibrator had, frustratingly, been in the way. Just the sight of it brings him out in a fever of highbrow reverence and primal animalistic urges. This temple where he can feast and worship simultaneously. Without even thinking, he bends and licks her.

Within the minute, he has her lying back on his suit jacket, her hands caressing his head which is between her thighs. The taste, the smell, the small sounds she is making: he is drunk on her. Her cry, as he slips two fingers into her, is the most goddam sexy thing he has ever heard. That this woman – this woman who restrains muggers and terrifies goalkeepers and saves people from drowning – is helpless on the ground because of him is incredible. She is the antelope and he the lion. He supposes his pride at this doesn’t say much for enlightened masculinity, but right now he is past caring. Right now, she is _his_.

“You’re so beautiful, Jaime,” she tells him in a fraught-sounding voice, as though this is one of the many secret things which had lain trapped behind her pursed lips for some time. Jaime considers doing this every time he wants emotional honesty from her. Just pulling off her underwear and licking and sucking on her until all the words she wants to keep in come tumbling out. He could get used to it.

“Have you ever imagined us doing this?” he asks.

“Yes,” she gasps.

“What else have you imagined?”

But apparently there is only a narrow window between Brienne being aroused enough to spill her feelings and Brienne being too aroused to remember her words. She cries out and pushes his face down hard again. It is one of the sexier ways that Jaime has been ordered to stop talking.

If she were making these sounds in any other circumstances, it would mean something terrible. The laboured breaths as though she is having a heart attack, the moans as though she is being physically hurt, the whimpers like grief. How can sexual excitement sound so like death and pain and sadness? He fingers her faster and her grip on his hair becomes painful. When she at last comes, she thrashes and trembles as though she is having a seizure, and Jaime takes a hard kick to the face, which, he has to admit, he probably deserves after his behaviour over dinner.

Gradually she stills. He enjoyed that. More than any man with a holstered cock has a right to enjoy anything. He does not intend for it to be a one-off.


	8. Chapter 8

Brienne hates getting taxis on her own. Her mum, Charlotte, was almost snatched as a kid, and her anxiety she handed down to her children as surely as her big blue eyes and an intense dislike of eggs – boiled, scrambled, fried, in an omelette: boak. Brienne, Gal, Dianna and Alysanne spent years believing that the streets were crawling with squint-eyed men who would attempt to lure them into their cars with the promise of sweets or visits to see puppies, and would then do unspeakable things to them. While Brienne is now tall and strong, it still goes against all her instincts to climb into a car with an unfamiliar man, and her adrenaline always starts to flow when the lock light comes on.

But, hunched on the concrete floor of the garage with her towel of ice, she made the decision to ring for a taxi because the alternative was to put more strain on her ankle by walking to the train station. She rang; they said someone would be there in thirty minutes. And then Jaime had arrived ranting about how he wished he’d never met her, before pulling her knickers off and going down on her in a way that left Brienne feeling as though a hurricane had ripped through her entire body. Hurricane Jaime. That’s a severe weather type that most women would run towards. Brienne had pins and needles in her face. Her chest was Splotchy Orgasmic Pink – probably not a colour people would want to paint their walls with. Her lungs and heart were doing overtime, and she was trembling from fingertip to toe. Jaime had helped her to her feet with consummate sweetness – as though he were an aid worker sent to help rebuild rather than the cause of this devastation. If Brienne were a town, all her houses would be rubble, all her trees would be uprooted, her power lines would be down.

When she murmured that she had a taxi coming, he gave her his arm and walked her out to the front of the house. Ostensibly she leaned on him because of her ankle, but they both knew that it was actually because her legs currently had all the stability of a jellyfish that’s been on the gin.

And now here they are, sitting on the edge of the fountain in the twilight, accompanied by Shae, Tyrion and the nine little girls who are also waiting to be ferried away early from this dismal place. Shae looks exhausted and the girls, tanked up on sugar and overexcitement, have become fractious and quarrelsome. Naturally, the losers are the toys; Toothless the dragon is wrested from his mother and thrown into the fountain. Toothless’s mother gains revenge by throwing in another girl’s pink furby, and then two unicorns go in. All hell breaks loose after that, with the girls threatening to call their parents and declaring they will never share snacks at break again. Only Tyrion seems happy, wandering about four sheets to the wind, quoting Caliban as he recovers toys from the fountain like a pretentious gundog, retrieving waterfowl.

Then he becomes emotional and begins dispensing hugs to the ‘three people he loves most in the world.’ First, Laia is embraced and kissed, then Shae, then Jaime. As he pulls away from Jaime, however, Brienne distinctly sees Tyrion smirk, and she realises with horror that the exact nature of what she and Jaime were up to while everyone else was toasting Tywin’s good health has just become clear to him. Apart from the embarrassment of this, his knowledge makes the whole thing very real. It can’t just be folie a deux now that Tyrion has turned his back, his shoulder shaking with suppressed laughter.

Brienne’s taxi arrives, and as Jaime helps her into the car, Tyrion opens his big gob. “Aren’t you going to share? You’re only ten minutes away from each other, right?”

Brienne can feel both men’s eyes on her, awaiting her answer. “Makes sense,” she says to her knees. “If you’re ready to leave.”

“I was ready to leave before we got here.”

Brienne’s hopes for the driver had been modest. She wanted someone who would not drive her to a remote location and attempt to rape or murder her, and she wanted quiet – someone who would not oblige her to listen to his views on Brexit and BoJo and would let her process what just happened – a process that she imagined would involve mentally dancing for joy whilst pummelling herself for letting it happen. But now the man that she let happen is next to her, and they have the surliest driver you could wish for. The thirty minutes to Jaime’s – the nearer house – is largely spent in painful silence, and Brienne can’t process a thing while Jaime’s hand lies an inch from hers.

When they pull onto his drive, he suddenly says, “Come in with me,” and Brienne finds herself nodding dazedly. The idea of being driven off into the night with no discussion over what occurred is appealing, but it also seems shoddy. Like sneaking out after a one-night-stand or purposefully giving someone a wrong number. Not things she has ever had done to her, but she has been quick to join in with the exclamations of “Pathetic, cowardly wanker!” about the men who have done it to her friends.

Jaime lets them into the house and they head through to the kitchen, Brienne still limping, and find Bronn sitting at the table, surrounded by empty packets of Wotsits. His fingers and lips are a luminescent orange and Brienne imagines moths will flock to him when he steps out into the dark. “You’re early,” he says accusingly, pushing down his laptop lid, and scrambling to hide the evidence of his cheese puff addiction. “What you doing back at this time?”

Jaime is crouching to hug Faith and Bear. “I’m sorry, I was under the illusion this was my house and I was paying you to dog-sit. If I’d known you were renting the place for the night –”

“I was enjoying having a bit of time away from the missus,” snaps Bronn. Then in a more unctuous tone, “Maybe I could stay a bit longer. I’ll go in another room, you wouldn’t even know I’m h –”

“I would. Is Caoimhe upstairs?”

“Aye. Put herself to bed about an hour ago.” Bronn starts to unabashedly study Brienne’s legs, making her want to tug her dress lower.

“She’s not had any bad dreams?” says Jaime anxiously. The setter regularly wakes herself howling or whining.

“Not heard a peep,” says Bronn, still studying Brienne. “I’ve done a timesheet, hours worked. What you owe me for this month.”

“Now?” says Jaime. “You need money now?”

“Well, I’m a bit short at the moment,” says Bronn shiftily, pulling out a sheet of paper adorned with cryptic squiggles.

Brienne can’t stand the way his eyes keep flicking back to her, coolly assessing. “Jaime, I’m going to have a quick shower,” she says.

“Oh, right.” He catches Bronn’s stare and seems to understand. “If you want to get changed, you know where my clothes are. I’ll be down here with the kids.”

Brienne nods and heads up to Jaime’s room where the third kid – or fourth if you count Bronn among them – is curled up in her basket on a memory foam mattress and a crocheted rainbow blanket that Sansa made for her. Caoimhe thumps her tail at Brienne, who strokes her and tells her how beautiful she is before going into the bathroom and showering away the day’s dirt. She wishes it were as easy to purge herself of Bronn’s eyes and Jaime’s relatives’ words, but she is still caked in them when she steps out onto the shower mat.

Back in the bedroom, she combs her hair and pulls on her bra, knickers, one of Jaime’s vests and some tracksuit bottoms. She had come into the house thinking they would talk about it. Now the idea is suddenly occurring to her that Jaime might want more than talk. He might expect – reciprocation, and just that thought is enough to have Brienne planning out ways of escape. She could make a run for it. Or rather a limp for it. Creep downstairs and hop down the drive before Jaime even knows she’s gone. Call Margaery to come and pick her up. This can’t be normal though. Surely normal women don’t react like this to a beautiful man’s sexual advances. Brienne extracts her phone from her bag, sits next to Caoimhe’s basket, and rings Margaery.

“Hello, you. How’s the party?” Margaery’s normally refined voice sounds stodgy, as though she is scoffing pringles. Sure enough, there is a loud crunching as Brienne replies.

“It was hideous. What are you lot doing? Arya and Ygritte back from the gig yet?”

“Nope. Apparently they went onto a bar, got thrown out when Arya threw a beer over some guy, and then ended up on the wrong train, so they’re waiting for one to bring them back. Idiots. And Sansa’s gone up for an early night. I’ve, against my better judgement, arranged a Tinder date and now reading We Need To Talk About Kevin.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“Name’s Tyene. I just hope she’s smarter than her texts make her sound. Comma splices everywhere. Apostrophes in the wrong places. They’re, there and their all mixed up. Spelling ‘to’ with one o when it should have two.” It is a shame Margaery can’t go on a date with punctuation. She’d treat it right and have far more sympathy when it explained all the ways it had been misused in the past than she does when women tell her.

“The book good?”

“So good. Why was the party shit? Where are you now?”

“Euch. Where do I start? It was basically real-life Twitter. I’d say something I thought was pretty innocuous and a load of dickheads would pile on me. All his relatives sneered at me for being a footballer. His ex or something sneered at me for what I was wearing.”

“Oh, man. What wankers.”

“Yeah. Then I sprained my ankle.”

“Crap. Badly?”

“Be okay with a few days’ rest.” Brienne takes a deep breath. She lowers her voice, not prepared to take any chances. “Something else happened, between me and... him.”

“Oh…? The latest twist in the world’s longest courtship saga. Did he kiss you?”

“No. Well… yes. But it’s _where_ he kissed me that’s the – the thing.”

“Brienne! At the party?!”

“In the garage. No one saw.”

“Fucking hell. I told you that dress was a good idea. Was he good?”

In spite of herself, it feels fun to be having this conversation. The kind of conversation that her friends have regularly and which Brienne has never been able to provide fuel for. “Yeah. Too good if anything. I couldn’t even think straight. He did this thing with…”

“His fingers?”

“Yeah. It was… Jesus.”

“Can I tell the others when they get in?”

“What? No!” hisses Brienne. “Look, I’m in his house.”

“So that’s why you’ve been whispering. Why the fuck are you ringing me then? Get back to him. Poor bloke won’t know whether he’s coming or –” She snorts.

“But I don’t know what to do. I’ve just realised he might be expecting – you know. I didn’t – sort him out. Earlier.”

“And you don’t want to?”

“No. I don’t know. I could be at home now with you and a hot chocolate with marshmallows and whipped cream, and my own pyjamas on.”

“Hot chocolate over sex. Get that will sorted, Granny Tarth.”

“I just know that if we… do it… it won’t be how I’ve imagined it. He’ll go off me as soon he’s got what he wanted. You know what I heard his brother say tonight? ‘You’ve not even managed to negotiate your cock inside her.’ What if it’s a bet? A challenge he set himself? Or what if he’s all pornified and wanting anal and trying to choke me or calling me a dirty slut like the guys the others have been with?

“Brienne,” says Margaery, almost primly. “I’ve never heard you sound so crude.”

“Well, I need help quickly. I haven’t time to beat around the bush.”

Another snort. “No, he already did that.”

“I’m not joking here. I’m ugly and awkward and no good at this. Whatever idea he’s got in his head of me –”

“Don’t do that,” says Margaery sharply. “Don’t say such nasty things about yourself. I know you’ve had a shit night with people being rude to you, but not one person who knows you thinks any of that, including him.”

“So what do I do?”

“Whatever you want and not a thing more. It’s going to be fine. Bye, Brienne.”

Brienne is not much comforted by any of this but she cannot reasonably put off going downstairs any longer, so she gives Caoimhe’s ears one last rub, checks from the window that Bronn’s truck is gone, and then heads very slowly back to the kitchen.

Jaime is lying on the couch there, still in his shirt and suit trousers, his eyes shut. There is a slight bruise on his temple where Brienne’s foot caught him earlier. The rest of his skin is the colour of raw gingerbread dough. His hair is a blend of honey and vanilla fudge. He’s so damn edible. Bear the Golden Retriever is settled across his chest and Brienne watches them for almost a minute before shutting the door behind her with a gentle click. They look like an update of that famous Man and Baby poster.

“Are you asleep?” she mumbles.

“No.” He opens his eyes. “Just thinking.”

“What about?”

“Oh. Lots of things,” he says. He rubs his eyes wearily, then blows gently on his dog’s nose. Bear responds by making playful snapping movements and then licking Jaime’s nose with enthusiasm. “I do have hot chocolate and marshmallows if you want some. In that cupboard. No whipped cream though, sadly.”

Brienne freezes. Her insides drop in a way not unlike the time Ygritte made her ride Oblivion at Alton Towers. What the hell? Why did he say that? Can he read her mind? Has Margaery just texted him? Brienne can picture the well-meant message as though she is reading it: “Get her a hot chocolate with cream and marshmallows! It’s her comfort food and she’ll be less stubborn and mean once she’s got a mug of it in her hand. You're welcome. Don't @ me.”

Jaime gestures to the counter behind his head, and Brienne sees a small white speaker there. A baby monitor. A fucking baby monitor. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no. Oh Sweet Mother of God, no.

“For Caoimhe,” says Jaime. “When she has a bad dream and cries, Bronn can hear and go and comfort her.”

“A baby monitor. For a dog.” Brienne doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry, throw the baby monitor at the wall, or, more appealingly, run – no, hobble – from the house shrieking.

“She’s sensitive,” says Jaime defensively. “She needs her routine. Bed at 9.30 in our bedroom – my bedroom,” he hastily corrects.

“So you heard…?”

“All your side of the conversation, yeah.”

Brienne hides her face in her hands, trying to take this information in. Trying to remember what she said. This is worse than the time she caught Gal and his mates sniggering over her diary where she’d detailed her first period and her feeling of being ‘a woman in bloom.’ Then anger starts to take over.

“So you just listened? You didn’t think it might be decent to turn it off?”

“Would you have?” demands Jaime. “Actually, don’t answer that. I know you would. I’m just not as honourable as you are, Brienne. I was too curious. Women really do tell each other everything, don’t they? Cersei didn’t have any real friends so she never did. She just used to lie about me to the papers instead.”

Brienne goes to sit on the chair Bronn occupied before, and leans her face down on the table top. It is Hurricane Jaime again. Blowing into her room as she masturbated. Accidentally finding out about the bet when he asked Sansa if there was anyone special in Brienne’s past. Somehow knowing exactly what her vulva looks like, despite Brienne’s determination that no man ever should. His little brother knowing what she _smells_ like. And now the damned baby monitor. It seems to be his stormy vocation to blow away all Brienne’s privacy, all her walls and fences, all her carefully constructed narratives for herself; she is meant to marry a nice, boring man when she is in her 50s, not be afflicted with someone like Jaime now.

“I think we should get a few things straight,” he says. “Melana isn’t my ex. Even when I was younger, I'd rather have put my dick through a cheese grater than be with her.”

“Oh,” mutters Brienne into the table.

“And talking of dicks, I know my brother is one, and so am I sometimes, but we do _not_ have a bet going on you.”

“Right.” She can hear the sound of claws as Bear leaps down onto the tiles and then a splashing sound that could be Brienne having a PTSD audio flashback of the moment Tyrion smirked at Jaime at the fountain, or could just be Bear having a drink with his rather floppy jowels.

From the fact that Jaime waits until the splashing is over before continuing to speak, she presumes it is the latter as he can hear it too. “I’m not some porn-junkie. I’m not going to call you a slut. I don’t want anal. I don’t want to – what else was it? Choke you? Jesus, Brienne. What do you think I am?”

“A man.” Brienne finally dares to look up. “A lot of you don’t behave that well, you know.”

“Yeah, well.” He gets up and comes towards her. “Another thing: I’m not going to go off you after I’ve got what I wanted. I’ve had a one-night-stand. _One_. After Cersei and it was horrible. As soon as it was over, it was like being crammed in a lift or a train with some stranger shoved up against me, for the next seven hours until she left. This awful enforced intimacy. I don’t want that again.

“What else?” he says wonderingly. “Oh yeah. I will happily go down on you whenever you let me. And, as you said I’m almost _too good_ at it, well...”

Brienne flushes. “You shouldn’t have heard that.”

“I shouldn’t have heard any of it. You’re more pissed that I heard the one nice thing you said rather than all the mean stuff. Anyway, I’m not done yet. I didn’t invite you in because I thought we’d end up in bed. I just didn’t want to be without you. I never want to be without you, but I couldn’t bear it tonight. I’m so in love with you, and I know that scares you, but…”

“Jaime,” Brienne says, the choke in his voice making her feel horribly guilty.

“Oh, and if you ever call yourself ugly or awkward in my hearing again, I’ll be forced to track down those academy twats – none of whom were good enough to play above League Two, incidentally; I checked – and break their faces. So there’s that,” he says, in a perfect imitation of Walter White in the Breaking Bad bath tub scene.

Brienne feels very raw by this point. Normally she hurriedly sweeps emotions under the rug and then boxes them up later, branding them with false names. Love renamed as _a little crush_. Fear of intimacy rebranded as _being sensible_. Rejection retitled as _just the way things are_. In this cyclonic climate, she cannot do that. Everything is blowing about in plain sight. Jaime waits for almost a minute before she can find the right words. “I don’t want to get hurt,” she finally admits, hating the pleading tone in her voice. “And I don’t want to hurt you. And the last few weeks, that’s all we’ve done.”

“So I’ve got the power to hurt you then?” he says, seeming pleased by the idea.

“Of course you have!”

He immediately kneels at her feet, perhaps sensing that she needs him to be smaller than her right now. “I know I need to give you time – I know that now. That you get overwhelmed. And I know that I can’t sulk just because you won’t let me say everything that’s in my head and know everything in yours. But you can’t just shut me out. And you can’t be dishonest just because the truth scares you. It isn’t fair.”

“Well, you can’t dig the truth out of my friends or listen in on my conversations. That isn’t fair.”

“I won’t. If I know you’ll be honest with me, in your own time, that’s all I want.”

“Jaime, it can’t be conditional. You can’t resort to espionage if you think I’m holding something back. We’re not the same person. I don’t belong to you. My thoughts are my thoughts.”

“Right. Just… don’t lie to me.”

Brienne watches him, and the realisation hits her in a way it hadn’t when she’d glanced over the tabloids. _He was cheated on. Over and over again._

Brienne knows what that can do to a person. She distinctly remembers her mum going through important dates trying to guess Selwyn’s mobile PIN. When that failed, she’d enlisted Gal to help her get his phone bills and they’d found the same number again and again. After he’d been caught that time, Selwyn had purchased a burner phone for his next extramarital affair. Charlotte had found it in his gym bag in the boot of his car. Another time, she’d gone through his pockets and found a receipt for two dinners at a Michelin star restaurant on a night he’d claimed to be working late. Poor Charlotte. By the end of her marriage she could have gone into MI6. She could follow cars without being seen, persuade hotel receptionists to hand over confidential information, infiltrate top-security buildings. She was a master of disguise (sunglasses, shawls, dark lipstick, the odd wig) while she did surveillance. She could hack into bank accounts to see what had been spent and when. She knew what the best technology was - spy cams disguised as clocks, trackers to go in briefcases.

Jaime’s semi-accidental blunders into Brienne’s private moments seem tame by comparison. Of course he couldn’t resist listening to her conversation when it was served up on a platter, complete with garnishing. He’d spent years with Cersei, then met Brienne, just as controlled and secretive in some ways. Brienne had been so focussed on her own neurosis, it hadn’t occurred to her that someone who looked like Jaime could feel unsure of themselves.

“I promise that I won’t lie to you,” she agrees.

He rubs at his stubble. “So, then. Are we –” He rubs some more. He’s going to ignite his own facial hair if he keeps it up with that level of friction. “I’ve never asked – Cersei and I just kind of fell into a relationship.” His cheeks go pink. He’s _blushing._

Brienne feels the weight of responsibility. Probably something akin to what Jaime felt when he first brought Caoimhe home. An awareness that a very beautiful, very damaged creature is now in her care. Jaime hopefully won’t do submissive pissings across the kitchen floor, awake howling, hide under the table when the doorbell goes, or chew up her soft furnishings, but he’ll no doubt do other many trying things. Brienne figures she might as well make full use of his good qualities too.

“Do you want to go upstairs?” she asks.

His eyes widen and for a few seconds he seems unable to speak. Then, “Yes.”

He helps her up the staircase because she is still limping, and they go into a spare room because, much as they love Caoimhe, they do not want her there as witness. Some of Brienne’s boldness leaves her at the sight of the bed, and they have a spirited argument about lighting (Jaime desiring high definition illumination, Brienne wanting the cloak of darkness as replacement for her clothes) before compromising on the beside lamp turned low. With Jaime’s mouth on her for the second time that night, she soon forgets boldness, neurosis, privacy, honesty, every fucking thing except the feeling radiating out from between her legs. This time, Jaime grips her hard as she starts to come, preventing her from bucking, kicking or writhing, and somehow this inability to ride out the pleasure through movement makes her cry out harder. Afterwards, she is grateful that they did this at his house and not hers because the thought of her friends overhearing the racket she was making is horrifying. That’s Ygritte’s style, not hers.

Jaime enters her tentatively, and it is nothing like the horror stories she has heard which include torturous pain and blood everywhere. Ygritte and Sansa both made their first times seem about as pleasant as giving birth, drug-free, with a particularly cack-handed midwife. Jaime is not cack-handed – or cack-cocked. Brienne finds it uncomfortable rather than painful; it brings to mind the rubbing and tightness of wearing a new shoe. Except, of course, that in that example it is the foot that feels discomfort rather than the shoe.

“Is it uncomfortable for you?” she enquires of Jaime, who is moving carefully on top of her.

“No,” he says in a strangled voice. “Am I hurting you? Shall I stop?”

“No,” she murmurs. He continues to move, his hazy eyes fixed on hers. It is so intimate and Brienne feels the nervous urge to giggle, but she suspects Jaime wouldn’t love this, so instead she says, “I just thought it might be hurting you. You know like how when you wear new shoes and until you wear them in, they’re too tight?”

“No. Doesn’t feel like that,” he breathes. "Feels incredible."

“Oh,” says Brienne. “Of course, sometimes they never do wear in. They’re just the wrong size or shape and they keep pinching your toes and making blisters on your heels.”

“Brienne,” he mutters. “Please stop talking about shoes.”

“I thought you wanted me to talk more.” With a sly look, she adds, “You can tell your brother now that you finally managed to negotiate your –”

Jaime laughs and kisses her, presumably to stop her talking.

After a few more minutes, he seems to forget about gentleness. His movements become fierce and desperate. Again, Brienne thanks heaven that this isn’t happening on her mattress whose springs would certainly be protesting very audibly at this treatment. He comes, groaning into her neck, his dick swelling inside her.

Brienne has shared a bed with her mother, both her sisters, Gal, Margaery, and Ygritte at some time or other, all without issue. She can sleep through snoring, the odd bit of teeth-grinding, loud farting, even Margaery’s starfish pose which once left Brienne all-but hanging on to the side of the bed to avoid falling onto the unattractively stained carpet of their travel lodge. Jaime, however is another matter. He sleep-mutters (“Where’s that sheep gone?” “I’m not at Hogwarts anymore.”). He snores lightly and sporadically. Brienne doesn’t mind this. It is his tendency to wrestle the duvet off her and to keep hugging her that riles. He is like a killer octopus -every time she disengages one tentacle, he slings another round her. At one point, still fast sleep, he finds his way down the bed and settles with his face pressed to her nether regions. By 1.30am, she is ready to smother him. They had moved back into the main bedroom after the shagging, and Brienne decides now that enough is enough. She hobbles back to the spare room, but the image of Jaime’s face when he wakes to find her gone prevents her from bedding down there. Instead she picks up the duvet, and returns to the main room where she wraps Jaime very tightly in his own cover before arranging the spare one for herself. Bound up like a caterpillar in a cocoon, Jaime is far less troublesome, and Brienne, buoyed by her own ingenuity, sleeps well until 8.30 when Caoimhe – who runs a tight ship – decides it is time for everyone to wake up.

Jaime, who is one of those people who lurches from instantly asleep to instantly awake, and vice versa, wastes no time in heading south again, leaving Brienne quivering and actually crying from pleasure.

“I dreamt of doing that,” he says quietly, wiping her tears away with his thumbs as she lies there on her back. Later she will ask him if he dreamt of it before or after he lost a sheep and left Hogwarts, but right now she just says, “I love you too.”

When Jaime has showered, he comes down to the kitchen to find Brienne standing over an array of food laid out on the kitchen top. Eggs, milk, flour, sugar, butter, bananas, syrup. The kitchen door – the one Brienne tried to escape though last week – is open, and the dogs are chasing one another around on the grass outside.

“I’m guessing Pia is the one who cooks with this stuff,” she says sternly.

“Yes,” Jaime admits. “She makes the odd meal for me sometimes. Are you going to make breakfast?” he adds hopefully.

“No. You are.”

“Me? You’re in the mood for burnt, congealed gloop, are you? Fair enough.”

“I’m in the mood for pancakes, and that’s what you’re going to make me.”

“I can’t.”

“You think you can’t. It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ll help you.”

Doubtfully, Jaime weighs out the flour and sugar. He uses the measuring jug to pour out milk and adds his egg.

“Now mix it together.” Brienne has given up using words like beat and whisk and cream. Jaime understands them, but they are part of an intimidating lexicon, and he appears to lose confidence whenever they are uttered.

They fry thick disks of the batter in melted butter; Jaime burns the first one, loses the second one to Bear when he tries to flip it with a flourish, and gets the third one stuck to the pan when he doesn’t add more butter. He huffs, puffs, wipes his brow, and gets quite red in the face over it. But then, with Brienne turning down the stove and ordering him to remove the pan whenever there is too much heat, with her gently guiding his hand as he flips it, and with her reminding him to check there is enough grease, he gradually gets it. There is, it seems, always the option to cool things down and take one’s time rather than rushing on and burning everything. It is fine to sensibly turn it rather than flamboyantly throwing and dropping it. 

They eat the pancakes with syrup and sliced banana at the kitchen table.

“They actually taste good,” says Jaime, stunned.

“Yeah,” says Brienne. “They do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all the people who left kudos and especially to those who took the time to comment. You're very kind and I'm really touched by knowing people have enjoyed reading it. Thanks again.


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